Skip to navigation Skip to main content

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 Taken to the logical conclusion, Connors’ paintings could be viewed as having superseded the reality upon which they are based.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: Goldsmith CCA, London (2024); 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.

Download full biography Updated

Selected Images

  • Turn-er, 2021

    More info
  • Location in English, 2020

    More info
  • Out from Blue Gate, 2019

    More info
  • The Ideal, 2018

    More info
  • Halved Fish (Boys Day), 2018

    More info
  • Murder(er)s Mom (For Patrick), 2018

    More info
  • L’Almanach 18, 3ème biennale internationale d’Art Contemporain
    Consortium Museum, Dijon, France, 2018

    More info
  • Proscenium for SMC (Black, Blue, Red), 2018

    More info
  • Folly Wall Monument Model, 2016

    More info
  • Large Ingot Index (IV), 2016

    More info
  • Untitled, 2016

    More info
  • Black/Green/Violet/Black/Blue/Red Small Bottom, 2014

    More info
  • Self-translating, 2014

    More info
  • The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World
    MoMA, New York, US, 2014, 2014

    More info
  • Green Large Reverse Telescope (Door), 2014

    More info
  • No Input (red, blue), 2013

    More info
  • Painter Painter
    Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2013

    More info
  • Thirds (violet/orange), 2012

    More info
  • What Was Music, 2012

    More info
  • Impressionism
    MoMA PS1, New York, NY, USA, 2012

    More info
  • What really went on there / We only have this, 2012

    More info
  • Fifth Tray Painting (dry), 2012

    More info
  • Correspondences, 2010

    More info

Selected media

Swap

Studio visit filmed by Jason Evans

Exhibitions

Publications