Matthew Allen

B. 1981

Works and lives in : Amsterdam, Netherlands

Education : Master of Visual Arts and Bachelor of Visual Arts, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

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Matthew Allen’s paintings form an ongoing inquiry into the materiality of paint upon support and the fundamentality of painting itself: colour, medium and process. Purity of medium and the experience of colour form the kernel of the artist’s abstract approach. The paintings are composed of a ground colour coated in transparent or translucent glazes, producing subtle, atmospheric gradients of tone. Devoid of any formal composition and physical traces of the artist’s hand, the works recall the aesthetic of abstract expressionism and the colour field painters of the Washington colour school. Their purity of colour, form and expression is somewhat therapeutic, tapping into the viewer’s subjectivity by triggering unique sensory and emotional engagement.

” Art is an evolutionary necessity.”

Photographs and text courtesy of the artist.