Matters of Materiality

27 Mar-3 May 2025

Untitled, 2024

Overview

JD Malat Gallery is pleased to present Matters of Materiality, a group exhibition that examines materiality as both substance and concept in contemporary abstraction. Texture has long been a means through which artists challenge perception, evoke memory and construct depth. In this exhibition, the surface is not a passive foundation but an active force; shaped, disrupted and redefined through process.

Throughout the history of abstraction, artists have pushed beyond the visual, treating material as a language in itself. From the weight of impasto to the raw tactility of industrial substances, texture has been a site of tension: accumulating, resisting and shifting over time. The works in Matters of Materiality extend this dialogue, revealing a sustained fascination with the physical and conceptual possibilities of surface.

Across varied approaches, the artists in this exhibition manipulate material to disrupt, conceal and reveal. Raw, hand-worked textures interrupt smooth, reflective planes; layered compositions stand in contrast to sharply defined grids. 

Santiago Parra’s sweeping black gestures embrace immediacy, stripping painting to its core, while Richard Hudson’s polished steel sculptures reflect and distort their surroundings, shifting between form and fluidity. Material becomes a site of tension, built up or broken down to explore weight, structure and depth. Across the exhibition, the physicality of surface is brought into focus, revealing material as something not just seen but felt, charged with movement, pressure and presence. These shifts in form and surface invite reflection on how material asserts itself through presence and absence, opacity and depth.

Matters of Materiality invites us to consider material beyond its physicality. Rather than serving as a passive surface, material is worked, manipulated and transformed, holding traces of process, gesture and intent. The exhibition considers how texture shapes experience, how material defines space, and how a work’s weight and presence shift perception.

Artists