Matt Connors: Finding Aid

8 Mar-2 Jun 2024

PV 7 Mar 2024

Overview

With: Clarice Cliff, Guy de Cointet, Masahisa Fukase, Joe Gilmore, Daan Van Golden, Luigi Ghirri, Jan Groover, Miyoko Ito, Suzanne Jackson, Mark McKnight, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Matt Paweski, Cora Pongracz, Kye Potter, Ryan Preciado, Patrick Prockter, Barbara T Smith, Masaomi Yasunaga amongst others.

Matt Connors' abstract paintings, drawings, and sculptures sensitively and intuitively balance colour and form to create affective artworks that often respond to architectural space and have a deep connection with art history. His rich network of references crosses the fields of photography, music, Modernist painting, printed matter, and poetry, of which he is a collector, publisher, and fan. Finding Aid is Connors’ first UK institutional exhibition and is conceived as an invitation to create a spatial manifestation of this broad network of relationships, staging his works in dialogue with other artists and designers.

Finding Aid – which references a meta-document produced by archivists used to navigate a collection – will feature new and existing paintings by Connors, alongside works by invited artists that emphasise linguistic structures, reflections, echoes, and formal connections, combining to create a poetic after-image. Connecting many of the works is a sense of movement between medium and framing, ideas echoed in Connors' paintings which suggest slippage through marks and overlays, or sometimes more literally as three-dimensional forms. Images are explored as simulacra whose meanings are mutable; Connors’ eye is particularly drawn to systems, doubling, translation, and plays on scale.

The surfaces of Connors’ works convey a sense of redrafting, mapping the gradual development or elaboration of an image-idea. This instinctive treatment of art is reflected in the artist’s approach to exhibition making, with connections between pieces in the exhibition existing as a record of thought. The artists included will evolve as the exhibition develops – as will the choices behind the presentation of Connors’ own work – up until the date the exhibition opens.