Matt Connors

Matt Connors is a painter who creates impactful visual compositions, with a sustained interest in form and colour. His work draws upon the history of painting and processes, particularly minimalism and abstraction, but is also influenced by design, poetry, writing and music. While his visual vocabulary is often borrowed from the modernist canon—colours, gestures, grids, framing devices and other geometric compositions—Connors’ approach is resolutely contemporary in both method and conception. In terms of colouration, his work triggers intuitive responses through complex and playful palettes. The viewer cannot resolve Connors’ compositional riddles through traditional formalist discourses—his work opens up a range of intellectual questions concerning mimesis, iteration and simulacra. Connors often works in series of interlinked, yet wholly autonomous works, in which a dialogue is established between repetition and variations in colours and form. Although his paintings might appear to depict something ‘real’—a familiar work of art for example—there is, in fact, no ‘original’. Taken to the logical conclusion, Connors’ paintings could be viewed as having superseded the reality upon which they are based. Matt Connors is also active in publishing artist books and other titles.

Matt Connors (b. 1973, Chicago) lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. He was included in the 2022 edition of the Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It's Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Other institutional exhibitions include: Lismore Castle, Waterford, Ireland (2022); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2015); MoMA, New York (2014) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2013); MoMA PS1, New York (2012), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (2011). In 2015, Matt Connors was a resident at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. In 2012, he published the award-winning book A Bell is a Cup.