Falling Tide Can Turn
Mindy Solomon is pleased to present Falling Tide Can Turn, the third solo exhibition of New York–based painter Matt Phillips. Featuring his signature approach to painting with transparent layers and pure pigment, the exhibition continues Phillips’s exploration of the visual language that has become central to his artistic practice.
In discussing the new exhibition, Phillips states: “These new paintings have an internal restlessness. Some days, when I came into the studio, they seemed close to being pictures of forms that could be named in clear terms. On other days, these same images appeared to embody actions that unfold through time—they moved, supported, bent, floated, and unfurled.
Embracing a shifting reading of the same image feels like a step in the right direction. In many of these paintings, a shape is as likely to describe the air between two objects as it is to describe a solid mass. A line can trace a firm edge or reveal an expanding fissure. This same logic holds true in the material world, as science often reminds us that no forms are actually still. Yet it is easy to slip into a mindset in which change equates to loss.
Making these paintings has often reminded me that everything shifts over time, and that change itself can be an opportunity to marvel at something in the process of becoming. Patterns that seem to have disappeared may have simply transformed. Shapes can bend and find a new way to take hold rather than simply break. Even the falling tide can turn.”
Phillips’s work is rooted in vibrant abstraction, employing simple shapes, nuanced color relationships, pastel-hued pigments, and silica on canvas. He begins directly on the canvas, without preliminary drawings, balancing control and spontaneity as he builds up and scrapes away layers of paint and material.
Wave-like patterns, shallow horizons, playful borders, and geometric interplay recur throughout his work, creating compositions that seem simultaneously static and in motion. Through this interplay of form, color, and material, Phillips invites viewers to consider the instability of perception and the continual transformation of the world around us.
Matt Phillips is a painter living in Brooklyn, NY. His works often employ fundamental elements of painting: simple shapes, modulated values and color relationships. These rather rudimentary components are combined and remixed to produce unexpected outcomes. Color, shape, mark and form engage one another in both strange and familiar ways, becoming tense, humorous, quirky and ultimately meaningful.
Matt Phillips has had solo exhibitions at The Landing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA; Direktorenhaus Museum, Berlin, Germany; Studio d’Arte Raffaelli, Trento, Italy; Devening Projects, Chicago, IL; Zillman Art Museum, Bangor, Maine; and Steven Harvey, New York, NY. He has participated in group exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Hollis Taggart, New York, NY; Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY; and Ampersand Gallery, Portland, OR. Phillips has been an artist-in-residence at The Fores Project, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony.
