Matt Magee

Phoenix Art Museum

By Paul Laster

A painter, sculptor and printmaker, Matt Magee has created his own visual belief system through the making of abstract, minimalist paintings and works on paper that explore systems, repetition and sequencing and the construction of surreal sculptures, which poetically blend elements from nature with manmade objects.

Magee was born in Paris, where his father was working as a geologist and archeologist, and schooled in Texas and New York, where he stayed and developed as an artist before moving to Phoenix six years ago. He is the 2017 recipient of the Arlene and Morton Scult Contemporary Forum Artist Award, which recognizes a mid-career Arizona artist who has demonstrated a sustained commitment to their chosen medium, continuous artistic growth and consistent artistic production. As the winner, he received a $5,000 cash award and one-person show at the Phoenix Art Museum this year.

Exhibiting paintings that he created over the past two years and suspended sculptures compiled from cut-up detergent bottles, as well as a large tabletop installation of found objects and small-scale assemblages, the multidisciplinary artist presents an overview of his diverse practice in his first museum solo and largest show of his works in his adopted hometown.

The largest painting in the exhibition is a diptych consisting of a pair of five-foot by five-foot panels that measure more than 10 feet wide when closely combined and are titled Star Map 1 and 2. Consisting of a gridded arrangement of various blue dots and dashes resembling a type of Morse code, the painting presents a personal language for mapping our vast galaxy, which is extraordinarily visible in the Arizona night skies.

Matt Magee, Star Map 1 & 2, 2018, oil on panel, 60” x 60,”each. Courtesy of the artist and the Phoenix Art Museum.

Equally grand in scale, the sculptural installation Purple Rain, which is composed of meticulously dissected detergent bottles that are wired together and suspended from an aluminum bar, is draped on the wall of a stairwell that leads down into the main gallery of the exhibition. Made with purple detergent bottles sourced from local laundromats, the piece cascades down the wall in a playful assortment of shapes and shades like a giant beaded curtain.

Smaller tabletop versions of the detergent bottle sculptures-some multicolored and some monochromatic-are strategically grouped and displayed on plinths, while a variety of midsize paintings hold the walls. The black-and-white paintings Sacred Geometry and Double Daimon, use compositions of concentric rectangles to reference Op Art; All of You, with its straightforward depiction of a big red letter “U” on a white field, and the big green number “7″ in Green Seven are witty riffs on Minimalism; and a pair of mica paintings, which are made with accumulations of layered and glued mica chips on wood panels, give a wink and a nod to the type of Nouveau Réalisme embraced by Arman and César.

At the center of this visual vortex of invention and sampling is Magee’s Prima Materia, an accumulation of 40 small sculptural objects, which he has been making since the late-1970s. Rocks get a sequence of holes drilled into them, colorful bottle caps get glued together to make totems and dried sea urchins nest in open sardine cans. There are also whimsical homages to Man Ray, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, but more vitally Magee’s evolving body of work is best viewed as a joyous index-one that reflects a cultured and creative life that continues to fully flow.

(May 24 - November 4, 2018)

Paul Laster is a writer, editor, independent curator, artist and lecturer. He is a New York desk editor at ArtAsiaPacific and a contributing editor at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art and artBahrain. He is also a contributing writer to ARTPULSE, Time Out New York, Observer, Modern Painters, Cultured Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, Galerie Magazine and Conceptual Fine Arts.

Filed Under: Reviews