Matt Saunders | Duets

BORCH Gallery & Editions is pleased to present Duets, an exhibition of new works by Matt Saunders as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2019. Centered around a series of monotypes, the exhibition extends Saunders’ ongoing collaboration with BORCH to encompass new ways of working with print and situates the artist’s print work into the larger context of his practice in painting and video.

Duets (2018–2019), is a suite of monotypes created by transferring both sides of watercolors made on linen simultaneously to paper. The prints carry the weave of the fabric as well as the subtle symmetries and asymmetries of front and back. Saunders’ monotypes sit in a lineage of reversals and doublings explored in his previous print works, yet allowing him to work quickly and experimentally, drawing aspects of color and especially transparency into the work.

Torsos—the bilateral cores around which we arrange our postures and identities—turn and shift and move through the series, and although few faces are to be seen, the images are charged with a mixture of psychology, homage, process, and materiality. Saunders describes his sources as figures ‘that seemed suspended in their media or their moments. Most are from videos and some from daily life, but all are about now, drawn from the last year or so. I was thinking about intimacy and bodies being presented, some more charged than others, yet all seen through my own humble encounters with them.’

Paintings of oil on thin chiffon as well as the video installation Painted Skin evince related thinking about materials and ephemerality. They demonstrate how Saunders’ work with BORCH Gallery & Editions has become an integral part of his practice as a whole and an incubator for new ideas.­

MATT SAUNDERS, born 1975, lives and works in Berlin and Cambridge, MA. His work has been exhibited across the globe, at such notable institutions as the Saint Louis Art Museum (2017), the Museum of Modern Art (2014), the Whitney Museum of American Art (2013), Tate Liverpool (2012), The Renaissance Society (Chicago, 2010), and the Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin, 2008). Since 2010, he has held a professorship at Harvard University. Matt Saunders has been working with BORCH Gallery & Editions since 2014.

ARTIST TALK BETWEEN MATT SAUNDERS AND JACOB PROCTOR (CURATOR MUSEUM BRANDHORST, MUNICH) ON 27 APRIL, 2019, AT 4 PM

Press Release / Pressemitteilung