victor matthews
American - born 1963
Victor Matthews works in a soft palette of white on raw linen canvas. His works are sophisticated and elegant and have a poetic playfulness about them. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Victor Matthews worked alongside his friends and contemporaries Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Donald Baechler, and under the tutelage of lifelong mentors Francesco Clemente and Brice Marden to develop his signature style. With perfectly choreographed chaos, Matthews’s paintings and drawings represent a sophisticated hybrid of traditional studio painting and street art techniques. The artist’s images teem with motion and abstraction.
Matthews’s singularly meditative representations of the island’s landscapes, flora, and fauna celebrate St Barth as both subject and muse, where the quiet seclusion of the island embodies the promise of utopia. “Somewhere there’s an inner feeling of serenity and peace among all living things...The connection is there all around us," explains Matthews.
Victor Matthews has exhibited extensively internationally. He was invited to showcase his work at both the 48th and 55th iterations of the Venice Biennale. His paintings are found in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and he counts music mogul Jay-Z, literary icon Salman Rushdie, Hollywood elites Forest Whitaker and Ellen DeGeneres, and artists Brice and Helen Marden amongst his most devoted collectors and patrons. Most recently, Matthews completed a public mural at the Los Angeles Lakers’ training facility; a callback to the artist’s street art roots.
