M+B is pleased to present Somewhere Else, Right Here, a two-person exhibition of new works by Matthew Rosenquist and Rob Thom. This is Rosenquist's first solo show with the gallery and Thom's third solo show. The exhibition opens on Friday, April 11 with an opening reception at the gallery from 6 to 9 pm.
In their two-person show, Matthew Rosenquist and Rob Thom present parallel visions of personhood and place shaped by the idiosyncrasies of Los Angeles, each artist forging a mythic narrative out of the everyday. Rosenquist’s carved wooden Angelenos and Thom’s hallucinogenic topographies form a surreal duet, refracting the city through lenses both intimate and fantastical.
Matthew Rosenquist’s sculptures take shape through a labor-intensive process that begins with brutal slabs of wood and ends with vivid, full-scale figures rendered in pigment and gesture. Carved with chainsaws, band saws, rasps, and chisels, then painted with a painter’s eye for nuance, these works embody the physicality of their making—brutal, expressive, and oddly tender. Rosenquist merges backgrounds in woodworking and painting to create life-size and larger-than-life wooden figures that capture a slice of Los Angeles life with a folkloric tilt. These hand-carved characters—be they holding Big Gulps, cradling pickles, or simply standing in their underpants—aren’t caricatures so much as concentrated observations. He neither satirizes nor sentimentalizes; instead, he treats his subjects with the odd grace of myth, rendering them with candy-colored paint and expressive gouges that give them a strange, devotional presence. As an artist consciously attuned to a suburbanized vernacular street culture circulating through L.A. and beyond, Rosenquist conveys rare insight into the self-conscious construction of identity and attitude. His sculptures explore not just how people present themselves, but how they are positioned—socially, spatially, and emotionally—within the broader terrain of city life.
Rob Thom’s paintings veer away from traditional landscape, instead embracing an exuberant mode of world-building. These works are infused with a longing—for light, for place, for a version of California that might no longer exist. Though based on sketches drawn from Los Angeles imagery, the glowing, punchy greens come from deep within Thom’s current environment in Seattle. These dreamlike terrains, which stack architecture, foliage, and fantasy into densely packed hillsides, are equal parts Hollywood Hills, Malibu, and memory. These works function as “dream neighborhoods”—an imagined best-of-both-worlds vision where the golden light of California meets the saturated lushness of the Pacific Northwest. They pulse with a desire not just for place, but for feeling: for warmth, hope, and aesthetic abundance. Painted less with intuitive nostalgia, they draw from a broad visual language that includes PCarl David Friedrich, Thomas Hart Benton and Wayne Thiebaud, and the chaotic, rising compositions of Thom’s earlier wrestling and sports paintings. Yet despite their playful, frenetic energy, the works carry a quietly restorative tone. Thom’s invented geographies offer a bright, reborn version of a place he still longs for.
Together, Rosenquist and Thom create a hyperreal Los Angeles—a city not strictly mapped but intuited, inhabited not just by people but by the psychic weight of aspiration, eccentricity, and reinvention. Their works are united by a deep curiosity about identity and environment, and a shared refusal to tidy up the messiness of either. In this way, the show becomes less about L.A. itself and more about how we try to make sense of the worlds we build and the people we become within them.
Matthew Rosenquist (b. 1972, Baltimore, MD) received his BA in Fine Art from George Washington University in Washington, DC and received his MFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA. He has had solo shows most recently at Gross Gallery in Los Angeles in 2024, Felix Art Fair Los Angeles, CA in 2024 Scooters For Peace in Tokyo, Japan in 2024, Smoke The Moon in Santa Fe, NM in 2021, Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, CA in 2021, Vita Art Center in Ventura, CA in 2019, The Lodge in Los Angeles, CA in 2016 and 2018 and The Lux Art Institute in Encinitas, CA in 2017. His work was also featured in Drop-in, curated by Pat Phillips at M+B, Los Angeles, CA in 2023. He has work in collections throughout the United States. Matthew currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Rob Thom (b. 1975, Santa Barbara, CA) received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. His work has been featured in international exhibitions including shows at Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; China Art Objects, Los Angeles; Harper’s, New York; Anna Zorina Gallery, New York; Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan and Galerie Julius Hummel, Vienna, Austria. Notable press includes The New York Times, CARLA, and the Los Angeles Times. His work is held in numerous private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rob Thom lives and works in Bainbridge Island, WA.