Matt Saunders | Monotypes

Matt Saunders has returned to the Copenhagen print studio of BORCH Editions to further explore the possibilities of the print medium for his artistic practice through a series of monotypes.

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 work. In the monotypes, Saunders finds a new way to work quickly and experimentally, drawing color and especially transparency into the work.

The series concerns bodies, and, typically for Saunders’ work, they emerge from media, especially film. 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.”

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 in Tacoma, Washington, lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts and Berlin, Germany.