Artist Spotlight: Matt Phillips

Anna Buckner

Slow Dance (for E.E.), Pigment and Silica on Linen, 58.5″ x 48″ 2015

I first came across Matt’s work during his interview with Gorky’s Granddaughter a couple years back. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Matt is represented by Steven Harvey Projects in New York City and was a founding member of TSA New York, an artist-run gallery in Brooklyn. Matt has shown extensively internationally – most recently at Devening Projects in Chicago, IL.

I was just talking about Matt’s paintings with a painter in Michigan the other day and he goes, “Oh! The guy who makes colored-pencil drawings?” While his paintings are not actually made with colored pencils, they have a similar laborious quality. Matt makes his own water-based paint and uses small brushes to cover flat areas of color. Each mark is legible and slow, mimicking the repetitive nature of embroidery or weaving, and is painted thinly – revealing the weave of the linen. But his paintings are also improvisational, creating space for change and response. There seems to be both a nod to and a criticism of abstract expressionism.

The edges of his canvases are often irregular, suggesting that the image is contending with gravity in the same way a quilt hangs on a wall. The shapes in his works have this same sense of vulnerability – like they might float away or slip off the frame if you don’t look closely enough.

Check out more of Matt Phillips’s paintings here!

Untitled (2), Pigment and Silica on Linen, 20″ x 16″ 2016