Matt Saunders

Matt Saunders´ main sources of inspiration are old avant-garde films and television archives. He re-casts this cinematographic iconography into paintings.

These hybrid forms interrogate how images live in different materials and in the viewer´s experience.

Trained as a painter, Saunders´ process is a painting/photography hybrid whose final form is a photographic print. At their most basic, his works begin with small ink on mylar sketches (4“ x 5“) derived from film and television stills. These mylar sketches are then used as negatives, either contact printed (laid directly on top of photo paper and then developed), or placed in an enlarger. As negatives, the mylar sketches are done in reverse-those parts which appear lighter in the photograph are darker on the painted negative and vice versa. Some of the larger images are contact printed using a large sheet of mylar to which Saunders has applied a variety of materials-oil paint, reflective metallic ink, cut paper, tape.

Under a sheet of glass, the large mylar sketch is placed directly on the photo paper which is then exposed and developed.

Matt Saunders was born in 1975 in Tacoma (Washington, USA) and lives in Berlin and Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA), where he is a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University. He studied at Harvard and at Yale University, where he trained as a painter.

He is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery and Blum & Poe.

 

Matt Saunders lives and works between Cambridge and Berlin.