Matthew Bourbon
Paintings
"I’m intrigued by Matthew Bourbon’s square, half-representational, half-abstract paintings. Like David Hockney, Bourbon is adept at blending two modes of representation in one image. In The Words We Agreed Upon and A Bucketful of Lies, figures mutate into irregularly shaped fields of geometric swatches of color. His interiors and figures suggest thinking and a kind of intellectual cosmopolitanism that seems precious today. (I keep reading his abstract elements as thought bubbles emanating from figures.) I also love the mise-en-abîme aspect of A Bucketful... and the way it recapitulates its subject, a group of abstract paintings, by becoming the thing it depicts. Bourbon’s might be “desert island” paintings—works you’d choose if you could only have one thing to represent painting in 2010."
--Toby Kamps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Menil Collection
Copyright 2010 Matthew Bourbon . All rights reserved.
