Currents 114: Matt Saunders

Currents 114 artist Matt Saunders works across a variety of media to challenge the boundaries of painting, printmaking, photography, and animation. Drawing on source material from avant-garde films to found photographs and using his own invented techniques, Saunders investigates the ways that images are repeated, altered, and distorted over time.

In the 114th installment of the Museum's popular contemporary art series, Saunders presents interrelated works conceived specifically for this exhibition, including monumental copper-plate etchings, oil paintings on chiffon, and photograms. Saunders produces his photographic works without a camera, instead passing light through oil paint on linen or varieties of ink on plastic to handmake images of luminosity and sharp materiality. 

Also featured in the exhibition is an animation video installation that will play across multiple screens and weave through two galleries. Saunders has long explored the “moving image,” in terms of not only film, but also in the way images move through the world and our imaginations. They draw our attention to how images remain in flux, changing over time in ways that often create new images in the process.

Matt Saunders has had solo shows at the Renaissance Society of America in Chicago and the Tate Liverpool and his work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Aspen Art Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is assistant professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Berlin.

Currents 114: Matt Saunders will be on view in Gallery 249 and 250 beginning November 17. The exhibition is curated by Hannah Klemm, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art, with Molly Moog, research assistant. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website