Each week Bushwick Daily brings you a new Artist FlashCard, introducing an amazing artist living/working/showing in Bushwick who you need to know. Featuring both new and old faces, our goal is to encourage the growth of art scene and to appreciate wonderful talent in our hood! If you know of an artist you would like to suggest for Artist FlashCards, please fill out our online form.
Who: Matthew Deleget
Where: He originally moved to New York City to do graduate work in painting and art history at Pratt Institute. Since then, he lived in a bunch of different neighborhoods, including Clinton Hill, Carroll Gardens, and now Boerum Hill. He has had studios in Clinton Hill, Carroll Gardens, Gowanus, and Dumbo.
What: Works ranging in style and medium, yet connected through their analytical and physical deconstruction of painting in order to expand the possibilities of the medium. By reconstructing the composition, he moves beyond the confines of the stretcher bars to the far reaches of the walls and the exhibition space.
Where you have seen his work: Most notably he has a piece in the 2014 Whitney Biennial (no big!), while locally he is in the group show Spitball at Storefront Ten Eyck (up throuhg April 6) that deals with the subject of humor along the absurdist lines of Andy Kaufman. He is also in a group show of MFA alumni at Pratt Institute, which was organized by Polina Barskaya, Alexander Kaluzhsky, Jesse Patrick Martin, and Bryan Rogers of Bushwick staple gallery Honey Ramka. Matthew will be staying busy this year with a solo show at Peter Blake in Laguna Beach, CA later this month, a show at the New Bedford Art Museum in Massachusetts this summer, and he will be in a two-person show this fall with artist Hartmut Böhm at Dr. Julius / AP in Berlin, Germany.
Why we’re into it: Matthew Deleget is an artist tour-de-force to keep your eyes on. His work focuses on the deconstruction of the canvas, yet he explained his technique as moving through different strategies that push the boundaries of painting to its limits. Of his work he says, “some of my strategies include monochrome paintings that are broken with a hammer, paintings that are made on-site in a show where I hang a canvas on the wall and then spray paint it and the wall at the same time, paintings that are made by random color and pattern generation, paintings that are made of plastic bags as a surrogate for paint, etc. I’m interested in the possibility in painting.”
Working in so many styles drove me to asking Matthew his influences. He is influenced by the people around him and those that have touched his life, starting with his grandfather who taught him how to paint, to the artists he works with and collaborates at his gallery Minus Space which he co-founded in 2003 with his wife, artist Rossana Martinez, based in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The artist’s biggest influence without a doubt is his wife, artist Rossana Martinez , who he met at Pratt in 1994. As the artists described, “She lived next door to me in the dorm my first semester – the girl next door – and we’ve been sharing everything ever since.” With art and life so intertwined, Matthew Deleget’s prolific career has only just begun.