M+B is pleased to announce Matthew Brandt: Velvet and Bubble Wrap, the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery featuring new work that explores Hollywood as both a construct and a landscape. The exhibition runs from December 14, 2013 through January 18, 2014, with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, December 14 from 6 to 8 pm.
Presented in this show are some new works made in my studio in Hollywood, California. Here is a list, in no particular order, of some of the materials involved:
velvet
acid
bubble wrap
dust
cocaine
H
aluminum
light
nebulae
cyan hair dye
magenta hair dye
yellow hair dye
black hair dye
Hollywood gaps
stripes
torsos
friends
- Matthew Brandt, Hollywood, November 2013
Cocaine, the Hollywood Sign, plush velvet, cheap fantasies, interchangeable personalities, identities of affect, trends, bubbles, stars, and slick surfaces—Brandt directly employs Hollywood tropes and transforms them, prodding and mixing the stereotypical, material signifiers of identity in the Los Angeles landscape.
Matthew Brandt’s images physically incorporate the work’s subject matter into his creative process, tethering conceptual creativity to material production and furthering the read. Starry night skies typically obliterated by city lights are elegantly composed in swirls of cocaine on black velvet. Torsos donning patterned and striped shirts are burned and etched onto fields of pristine white silk velvet. Gaps between the letters of the Hollywood sign are printed in hair dye on bubble wrap, glowing in abstracted scenes.
Matthew Brandt (b. 1982, Los Angeles) received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2004 and his MFA from UCLA in 2008. He was recently featured in Art+Auction’s “50 Under 50: The Next Most Collectible Artists” in the June 2013 issue, and his first solo exhibition at M+B in the fall of 2011 was met with critical attention: selected by Modern Painters as part of “The 100 Best Fall Shows” and reviewed in the December/January 2013 issue. Brandt was included in the “The Top 30 Under 30 in Art and Design” for Forbes by Jeffrey Deitch in 2012 and Art in America included him in their “Top Finds at Paris Photo Los Angeles” earlier this year. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Armand Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Bidwell Projects (Ohio), The Sir Elton John Photography Collection, UBS Art Collection, Statoil Collection, Columbus Museum of Art (Ohio), Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), North Carolina Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Cincinnati Art Museum (Ohio), Royal Danish Library and Wieland Collection, among others. This fall, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio will open Brandt’s first institutional solo exhibition entitled Sticky/Dusty/Wet, which will travel to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in the fall of 2014. Recent institutional group exhibitions include Land Marks at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Reality Check at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Currents at the Contemporary Art Museum (North Carolina) and Staking Claim at the Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego). Matthew Brandt lives and works in Los Angeles.
For more information, please contact Alexandra Wetzel at M+B at (310) 550-0050 or alexandra@mbart.com.
Matthew Brandt "Night Sky" Disclaimer: Some artworks in this exhibition contain trace amounts of cocaine incorporated into the materials used and thus rendered unusable in any other context. The inclusion of the cocaine is strictly for conceptual artistic purposes and is not intended in theory or practice to be considered by the viewer or purchaser in any other way. The Artist would deem the removal of any materials from any of these pieces an unauthorized alteration or destruction of the work in violation of the Artist's copyrights including, but not limited, to the Visual Artists Rights Act.
