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Informality is excited to present a selection of small paintings which were completed over the summer of 2019 and recent drawings by British multi-disciplinary artist, Peter Matthews.
These works were created with profound intimacy with place and time, space and landscape, being and memory, presence and absence. Each work is coupled with another, one from the Atlantic Coast of Maine (US) or Cornwall (UK) and the other from the Pacific Coasts of California and Oregon, each work resulting in having independently diverged and converged together again after miles and miles of journeying by plane, bus, train, car and foot.
Peter Matthews is an English artist who spent his youth wandering across the fields and beside the River Trent in Derbyshire and Leicestershire. He graduated with an MA in fine art from Nottingham Trent University in 2003. His practice to experience the sublime and to coexist in a solitary symbiosis with nature has seen him venture long distances, often aimlessly and just following an innate calling, to remote places along the coasts of our world to Chile, Brazil, México, Japan, California and Taiwan. When in England, he works in a wild place along the Atlantic coast of Cornwall where he has been developing a hermetic way of working along the rocky shore, semi-lost and semi-found somewhere between the intertidal reaches of land and water.
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Peter Matthews
From the Atlantic coast of England (bottom) and the Atlantic coast of Maine (top), 2019 Oil paint and earth matter on canvas on plywood.
49.8 x 35.7 cm
19 61/100 x 14 3/50 in -
Peter Matthews
From the Pacific coast of California (top) and the Pacific coast of Oregon (bottom), 2019 Oil paint and earth matter on canvas on plywood
40.4 x 68.3 cm
15 91/100 x 26 89/100 in -
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Glynn Vivian Gallery, Wales, 'Grounded 2021' Installation view. Image Courtesy of the artist.
In 2019 Peter Matthews was awarded the inaugural Creativity Fellowship by Swansea University and held a solo presentation at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, Wales.
The Fellowship brought together Dr. Ruth Callaway’s study of coastal environments and Matthews' both of whom had spent years immersed in observing, experiencing and thinking about coastal landscapes.
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'Much of the power of Matthews images derives from a tension between their poignant gestures at formal, even mathematical, rigor (the numbers, the notational conventions borrowed from meteorology and hydrography) and their simultaneous general air of shattered unraveling'.
- Dr Graham Burnett
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It would be easy to laugh, to dismiss Matthew’s whole creative practice as the wishy-washy silliness of an oceanstruck romantic. But the fine, cartographic drawings and philosophical way he speaks about changes in form are beautiful, intriguing, sometimes saturated with vulnerability. Perhaps is it absurd. Perhaps it is dangerous. Or perhaps floating in the ocean with a huge sea-soaked sheet of paper is as close as Matthews can get to what Keats called tracing with the magic hand of chance. “I love how the sea writes itself,” says Matthews. “I’m just following the ocean, really.”
- Nell Frizzell, The Guardian, September 2016
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Peter Matthews
From the Atlantic coast of Maine (right) and the Pacific coast of California (left), 2019 Oil paint and earth matter on canvas on plywood
34.1 x 52.5 cm
13 43/100 x 20 67/100 in -
Peter Matthews
From the Atlantic coast of Maine (right) and the Pacific coast of California (left), 2019 -
'What we have here in a most palpable form is the age-old aspiration to sea-knowledge, the idea that there must be a mathesis of the abyss.
- Dr Graham Burnett
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Peter Matthews
From the Atlantic coast of Maine (top and the Pacific coast of California (bottom), 2019 Oil paint and earth matter on canvas on plywood
48.8 x 31.9 cm
19 1/4 x 12 1/2 in -
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Matthews’ works have been shown at the North Carolina Museum of Contemporary Art, the Drawing Center, New York, the National Maritime Museum in London, the Saatchi Gallery, London, the Museo Nazionale della Montagna, Torino, Italy and Drawing Room, London amongst others. Matthews exhibited at the 2018 and is also exhibiting at the 2020 John Moores Painting Prize held at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool which is open throughout this spring and summer. He has been the recipient of three Arts Council of England grants, is a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow and in 2020 he was awarded a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York.
Peter Matthews: Panels and Drawings from Along the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts
Past viewing_room
