Matt Saunders

Matt Saunders’ suite of three etchings ruminates on the complex nature of intimate relationships, eroticism and loss. He employed the principle of doubling in previous print projects as a way to visualize double consciousness and split personality, and returns to it here in one of his first print projects in color. The prints are executed from two plates and printed in two colors that enter into a kind of equilibrium, combining and separating at the same time. Two Lovers is a double portrait of one person. Two Bathers combines two women from different centuries (Marthe de Méligny and actress Jane Birkin). Two Losses is based on pictures by the Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase of two of his intimate partners.

Matt Saunders created a series of monotypes by simultaneously transferring both sides of watercolours made on linen to paper. The prints carry the weave of the fabric as well as the subtle symmetries and asymmetries of front and back. The works continue the principles of reversal and doubling Saunders had explored in his previous print projects, yet they allow him to work quickly and experimentally, adding color and transparency to the works.

In five large-scale prints, Matt Saunders works with portraits of the fictional movie character Leni Peickert, who appears in two films by German director Alexander Kluge. Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (1968) and Die unbezähmbare Leni Peickert (1970). Kluge’s films depict a young woman leading a business, a young artist trying to modernize a circus in a modern media environment. Saunders uses a visual doubling, a hand-drawn overlapping of frames rendered in soap ground, to visualize the character’s inner state. The instability of the ground and time-based action of the acid led to images that are, in one-way, stable combinations of multiple frames and in another way irreconcilable, suspended in flux.

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‘Kitty Winn and Al Pacino’  is based on two movie stills depicting the two actors of the same name in Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 romantic drama Panic in Needle Park. Saunders almost completely erases the couple’s features, directing our attention from the movie characters and the actors’ celebrity status to their emotional connection, the moment of intimacy between two lovers. Saunders creates poetical, but very approachable depictions of personal motifs, which explore the potential of materials. With a sophisticated knowledge of printing techniques and great consciousness of their effect, he experiments openly with various techniques, creating an effect of almost tangible texture and depth.

The imagery of Brigitte in the Reeds, Matt Saunders’ first print project with BORCH Editions, is based on Robert Siodmak’s film Menschen am Sonntag (1930), which follows a group of young people on a day out to a Berlin lake. His prints focus on a brief moment when Brigitte, one of the movie’s characters, adjusts her bathing suit away from the others in the reeds; an intrusive and intimate moment, with the camera hovering close behind her back.

Matt Saunders was born in 1975 in Tacoma, Washington, lives between New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he currently teaches at Harvard University, and Berlin, Germany.

Solo exhibitions of his work were held by the St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2018), Tank Shanghai Project Space, China (2018); Tate Liverpool (2012); and the Renaissance Society of Chicago (2010), among others. His group show participations include Ecole des Beaux arts de Paris, France (2022); the American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York (2022); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2020); The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2016); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016).

Matt Saunders’ work is in the collections of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the UCLA Hammer Museum, California; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., among others. He was a recipient of the 2022 American Academy of Arts and Letters Arts Purchase Prize, the 2015 Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the 2013 Prix Jean-François Prat, and the 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award.