P & ting
On View: February 20th - present
opening Reception: Friday, march 6th, from 6 - 8 pm
Reopening: July 2020
LaMontagne Gallery in collaboration with Cube Art Boston is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Matt Rich
Painting&, & Painting, Painting & Anything, Anything in Painting, Any Thing in Painting, P & ting, P & Ting, Pain & Ting, P&!NTING, p&!nting
Matt Rich’s first solo show at LaMontagne Gallery features a new set of cut-canvas paintings about the spirit and symbol of the ampersand.
The paintings’ compositions are built, piece-by-piece, without depending on additional support structures. They are open to constant editing in a process of addition, subtraction and substitution. The paintings represent collections of surface fragments—often harvested from several other painted surfaces. Joined together, these fragments read like uneven terrain—they are not flat, like stretched canvas; instead they have interior borders that create mini-ruptures, bends, creases, and wrinkles that cause them to undulate along the surface of the wall—in a kind of surplus of surface—casting shadows and complicating their definition of flatness.
The illusion of three-dimensional space is played with—sometimes overtly, or sometimes as a smaller gesture within a more spatially contradictory composition. This parallel formation, between real material space and illusionistic space, implicates the body and the eye together.
Matt Rich (b. 1976 in Boston) After graduating from Brown University with a degree in Visual Arts and History of Art and Architecture, Matt Rich received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Terra Foundation for the Arts, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His work is featured in several collections such as the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City and the List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has had several solo-exhibitions in his hometown of Boston and many group exhibitions including the James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. He has exhibited across the United States such as his solo-exhibition at the Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas. Most recently, in 2020 Matt Rich’s work will be exhibited at the Getty Museum in the exhibition Victoria Fu & Matt Rich.