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.

Matt Saunders has been working on a series of landscape etchings since 2015. In an allusion to Wallace Stevens’ poem Six Significant Landscapes, the series comprises six prints. Drawn from film stills, each of Saunders‘ landscapes is at once an empty scene open to projection and an emblem of the emotive and narrative currents swirling off camera. Saunders has spoken of these works as ‘grasping for the subconsciousness’ of the film.

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.

After concluding the five large-scale etchings of the Ratlos/Indomitable (2017) series, Matt Saunders was so intrigued by the backs of the printing plate that he decided to print them in an edition of 5. The marks and scratches bear witness to the printmaking process and show how the developing time in acid brings forth the indentations. Both Ratlos/Indomitable and Back (Ratlos/Indomitable) were part of Matt Saunders’ 2017 solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where the respective counterparts from the two series were presented on both sides of a freestanding wall.

Leni Peickert, portrayed by German actress Hannelore Hoger, is the protagonist of two movies by Alexander Kluge, Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed (1968) and The Indomitable Leni Peickert (1970). Peickert, a young artist and circus director trying to safe her business from bankruptcy, is torn between her radical will for self-realization and the stereotypical role imposed on her by a male-dominated society. Saunders visualizes this inner conflict by printing her counterfeit from two plates, literally splitting her face in half. In 2017 he returned to the character of Leni Peickert and elaborated on the idea of a spilt consciousness for the five large-scale prints Ratlos / Indomitable.

‘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 cast of the German silent movie Menschen am Sonntag (1930) has inspired a number of Matt Saunders’ printmaking projects. The film classic about a group of young people spending a summer day by a Berlin lake features the character of Annie, who plays an exceptional role in the story line. Annie does not join her friends and stays in bed all day, furious after a conflict with her boyfriend. The image Saunders chose for his series of four prints unhinges Annie from her role in the film. Fast asleep, her face radiates a quiet serenity, while the viewer involuntarily enters the awkward experience of witnessing the vulnerability of a sleeping person.

Matt Saunders frequently works from film stills, and the German silent film Menschen am Sonntag has inspired a number his printmaking projects. The film classic about a group of young people spending a summer day by a Berlin lake follows their interactions, flirtations and episodes of petty jealousy. The frame Saunders chose for his print depicts Christl isolated from the rest of the cast. Her expression is unreadable; her focused stare testifies to her strong emotional involvement, but is hard to read. The object of her gaze is outside the frame, the viewer is unable to tell what may have provoked such a state of physical and emotional alert.

In Ilsted (Annie) #1 and Ilsted (Annie) #2 Matt Saunders depicts Annie, one of the protagonists of the German silent film Menschen am Sonntag. The title references Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi’s wife Ida Ilsted, whom Hammershøj portrayed frequently. Saunders was introduced to these portraits by Niels Borch Jensen during a visit to the National Gallery of Denmark.

For Rose Hobart, a portrait of the late Hollywood actress, Matt Saunders used a film still from East of Borneo, a 1931 B-movie directed by George Melford. In 1936, artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell cut and re-edited the film and used it for his surrealist short film Rose Hobart.

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.