M+B is pleased to present Rearview, an exhibition of new works by Matthew Brandt. This is the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery. The exhibition opens November 23, 2024 and will run through January 11, 2025 with an opening reception on Saturday, November 23 from 6 to 9 pm.
Matthew Brandt’s artistic practice bridges historical traditions with contemporary innovation, drawing inspiration from 19th-century American landscape photography while reviving time-honored techniques. Brandt’s unique approach integrates physical elements sourced directly from his subjects—lake water, tree-derived charcoal, and even unconventional materials like tar or cocaine—transforming his works into a dynamic interplay between art and nature. This process imbues his photography with a sense of organic unpredictability, allowing natural forces to shape the outcome and revealing the tension between human control and entropy. His work, whether focused on landscapes or human-made structures, highlights the poetic and tactile qualities of his materials, creating images where the subjects themselves actively contribute to their depiction.
Brandt’s latest exhibition focuses on Los Angeles, capturing the city as a realm of stark contrasts, where timeless landscapes meet the relentless sprawl of freeways and smog-filled horizons. Employing a variation of the ancient fresco technique, he translates LA’s iconic freeway systems, palm trees, and saturated sunsets into layered compositions that are as rugged and weathered as the city itself. Each fresco, created with pigment and plaster is formed through a meticulous process. Layers of plaster are applied to a cement board, serving as a base for transferring the pigment from his photographic inkjet prints onto the wet surface. Each layer corresponds to a different image, with the process demanding careful application and adjustment. The material properties of the plaster result in cracks, breaks, and bends, echoing the entropy and impermanence of the city Brandt seeks to depict.
Each piece in the series resonates with personal memory, recalling Brandt’s childhood spent gazing out of a car window at the city’s labyrinthine highways. Monumental in scale and spirit, these frescoes underscore the raw physicality of LA’s sprawling structures. The ancient medium of fresco, tied to architecture and endurance, serves as an apt vessel for his exploration of the city’s dual nature—its simultaneous permanence and decay.
In Brandt’s hands, the freeways become symbols of both movement and stagnation, encapsulating the allure and despair that define Los Angeles. The weathered textures mimic the passage of time, with cracks and abrasions suggesting the city’s enduring struggle against nature’s forces. Rendered in soft, faded hues, the palm trees and sunsets evoke a poignant nostalgia, tethering the viewer to a shared memory of place. Brandt’s frescoes honor Los Angeles not merely as a physical environment but as an emotional and historical landscape, embedding the city’s complexity into every layer of plaster. His work is a hauntingly tactile tribute to LA, merging history, memory, and material into an enduring dialogue with the city he calls home.
Matthew Brandt (b. 1982, Los Angeles, CA) received his BFA from Cooper Union and MFA from UCLA. The artist has been the subject of numerous institutional solo shows, including Light & Matter: The Art of Matthew Brandt at the Forest Lawn Museum, CA; Orphic Forest, Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Rocks and Eagles at the Newark Museum, NJ, Sticky/Dusty/Wet at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus OH, which travelled to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA. Recent museum group exhibitions include Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene at the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (traveling); Ansel Adams in Our Time, de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA (traveling); New Territory: Landscape Photography Today at the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; The Magic Medium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Second Chances at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; What is a Photograph? at the International Center of Photography, New York, NY; and Land Marks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Brandt recently received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Award in the discipline of Photography. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Art Gallery of South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Cincinnati Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Royal Danish Library, National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Denver Art Museum; High Museum, Atlanta; Detroit Institute of Arts; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. Matthew Brandt lives and works in Los Angeles.
