Voodoo Ray vs Zombie Modernism

McAvoy, Emil. (2016). Matt Henry: Long Division publication. New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

Available as a PDF download here.

Origin Stories

While Matt Henry's practice makes an internationalist address, it is grounded in Aotearoa New Zealand as a vantage point from which to view and participate. He maintains a direct dialogue with trajectories of abstraction emerging from twentieth century Modernism centred in Europe and North America, yet his work consciously reflects its Antipodean geographical context. Of course this is also the well told story of New Zealand art and its oft cited “tyranny of distance” to such centres. In this sense, Henry's work is as connected to Kasimir Malevich and Aleksandr Rodchenko as it is to Billy Apple and Julian Dashper. Yet the products of Henry's particular peripheral vantage point strike a new chord, reverberating across time and geographical distance.

When viewed in concert, the dynamic of architecture and painting in Long Division not only offers a window into Henry's wider practice, but also an arts organisation that has influenced and supported it. Born and educated in New Plymouth, Matt Henry is innately connected to this place. He is connected to the site of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in particular, having been a frequent visitor during a formative period, later an exhibition technician, and a subsequent exhibiting artist.1

Long Division sees Henry navigate the spaces of the newly reopened Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre. First opened in 1970 in the former Regent Cinema, the building was remodelled as an art gallery by architect Terry Boon. Henry's work intercedes between Boon’s alterations and the recent renovations by Patterson Associates alongside the Len Lye Centre expansion.

Long Division also makes specific reference to Billy Apple's architectural intervention as art work in The Given as an Art-Political Statement (1979). Based in New York, Apple was funded by the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council (now Creative New Zealand) to undertake a national tour of major New Zealand galleries. As Robert Leonard notes, the intention was to update local art scenes via exposure to Apple's work, yet the artist used the opportunity to correct a number of perceived errors in the architectural design of their galleries.2 Apple widened a section of the Govett-Brewster’s staircase leading down to the mezzanine floor. Since the 2015 renovations, Apple has removed a slice of the skirting board on the long wall of the lower gallery and placed a survey peg marking the midpoint of his elongated division of staircase. The placement of Henry's canvas partition dead centre playfully reasserts its original geometry.

Dividends

For this exhibition, Matt Henry channels his experience as a former exhibition technician and his knowledge of the Govett Brewster’s complex architecture. His paintings are used as internal partitions or to mimic existing cabinet fixtures to create a site-specific installation that draws this unique building and its histories into conversation. In particular, Henry engages the architectural modifications to the long internal wall parallel to the old building entrance. Prior to the renovations, this wall was divided in half by the entrance to create two galleries. Henry's placement of a freestanding canvas in the centre divides the wall again and conjures an image of the galleries as they once were. 

These stretched canvas partitions, dyads of two cedar stretchers butted back-to-back, jut out from the wall as quietly defiant sculptures. They intervene in the physical space and influence its navigation by visitors: art as exhibition design. In a reversal of the Modernist white cube tradition – in which the room is intended to disappear behind the paintings – Henry responds to this specific site and connects his work to it materially and conceptually. In a playful doubling, he employs the visual language of Modernist abstraction, itself influential to the development of the white cube exhibition model. 

Henry likens the large freestanding canvases to office dividers, demarcating spaces and providing visual and physical barriers.3 The hue of their unprimed premium Belgian linen resembles the cheaper utilitarian jute of an office pin board, and the thin borders of black paint appear as plastic or steel trim. By implication, the rooms simulate office spaces and speculate on ideas of 'work'. Henry upsets the traditional display of painting by placing his canvases on the floor, finding an accord with Anna Chave's critique of Minimalism's co-option by corporate interests.4 Ironically, far from the status objects paraded in masculinist corporate boardrooms and foyers, Henry's paintings act as readymades, as if they were mass produced furniture dividing lower level 'zombie' office workers from executives and from each other.5

In counterpoint, the suite of paintings which echo pre-existing control cabinets almost disappear into the walls. Almost. By imitating found fixtures in the galleries, Henry draws their function into the exhibition’s content. His paintings foreground these institutional functions, such as lighting, embodied in the design of the building. Reframing the Gallery's means of display as a subject, he invokes the architects' absent yet ongoing presence, and the role of the resident art institution within.

These hyper-minimal canvases are constructed in the vein of fine furniture. The canvases are stretched, folded, stapled, primed and painted with such precision as to look prefabricated, to the extent that their meticulous craft can easily be overlooked. Watching Henry work is captivating, but it can also be torturous. The scrupulous attention to detail means a canvas can be ruined and discarded in seconds if it doesn't maintain his fascist flirtation with a machine aesthetic. Henry is interested in the complex interconnected relationships between art, design and fabrication that artists like Donald Judd and Richard Artschwager highlight.6 Both artists produced functional furnishings analogous to their sculptural pieces, in Artschwager’s case having previously worked as a cabinet maker. Citing the blurred boundaries of their backgrounds and practices, Henry considers how we attribute value to different forms of creative production within wider cultural and commercial contexts.

Voodoo Ray

The anomaly in this exhibition is Voodoo Ray (2015), a mimesis that echoes the design of a fire extinguisher panel, placed low on the wall near the elevator where you would expect to find such signage. Its pulsating cadmium red and vanadium yellow diagonal stripes are widely associated with fire or the potential for danger, and may provoke responses from excitement to alarm. 

Its title is borrowed from an eponymous 1988 acid house track by A Guy Called Gerald, a popular and pioneering piece signalling dance music's emergence from its post-punk roots into the United Kingdom's mainstream. Henry's iconography for this piece is borrowed from the graphic design work of Peter Saville, who branded Factory Records and designed record covers and posters for bands such as Joy Division and New Order. He also recommended Ben Kelly for the interior design of the infamous Hacienda club in Manchester, a centre of house music and rave culture in the late 1980s and 1990s. The walls and interior features of the Hacienda were decorated with diagonal stripes co-opted from industrial contexts, reflecting the club's former function as a warehouse. Where these high contrast signs would normally mark potential hazards in the interests of safety, Ben Kelly repurposed them as aesthetic signifiers of exuberance and excess. 

Henry's Voodoo Ray acts as a kind of pivot for the exhibition: its poetic title, intense colours, loaded signification and peripheral location are in contrast to the other paintings. In addition, it completes the installation's unusual conflation of nightclub, art gallery and corporate office, and in doing so, it opens the collective works up to new readings.

Voodoo Ray vs. Zombie Modernism

If works such as Kasimir Malevich's Black Square (1913-15) and Aleksandr Rodchenko's Pure Colours: Red, Yellow, Blue (1921) can be seen as the monochromatic gravestones of painting, they double as landmarks of its subsequent reincarnation in other forms. Or at least its reanimation, to which the histories of twentieth century abstraction surely testify. This is also perhaps visible in the death-drive inherent in Clement Greenberg's adherence to the flattened picture plane, his ideology repeating the imperative for such gestures ad infinitum.

Henry practices after this apparent death of painting, not to mention Roland Barthes' death of the author. This is inherently the case given his historical context, nevertheless for Henry it is also a form of conscious activity. His visual and material language reanimates Modernist abstraction and explicitly connects it to the contemporary world outside of painting in a manner which might make Greenberg turn in his grave.

The title of Henry's Voodoo Ray inevitably evokes the practice of voodoo, the mystic religious rituals of select non-Western cultures that wilfully engage in alleged possession by unknown beings and unseen forces from beyond the visible world. These practices, real or imagined, operate outside the dominant narrative of Western rationalist-materialism, and pose unsettling questions for the certainty of its explanatory model.

Recent revisionist art histories have unlocked compelling evidence of mediumship (channelling spirits or the dead) present at the birth of Modern art, particularly in the work of artist mediums Hilma af Klint and Georgiana Houghton, which predates the work of Kandinsky, Malevich and others.7 Their practices cast doubt on the limits of rationalist-materialism's influence on the development of Modernism, and reframe it as something much more complex, contradictory, and more deeply connected to nineteenth century spiritualism than was previously thought. 

In today's unregulated late capitalist art market, the hyper-commodification of painting has birthed what Walter Robinson coined 'Zombie Formalism', an outbreak of derivative paintings that adopt the formal appearance of Modernism, yet have little if anything to contribute culturally or artistically, and which ultimately act as empty, inflated vessels of capital that just won't die.8 It is a lingering spectre in need of an antidote, save it come to infect the populace and force us to join them forever.

Perhaps a remedy might be found in the dead themselves. Not the walking dead, but the possibility of possession by good spirits who have passed on to the other side. If not in practice, then at least in theory, in our imaginations. In light of these intersecting ideas, and the territory invoked by Henry's Voodoo Ray, even his divider paintings might begin to appear to stand unsupported, as if held upright by an invisible force.

1 Henry's exhibitions and performances at the Govett-Brewster include: Fahrenheit, Open Window, 2009; Mostly Harmless: a performance series, 2006; View, Group Exhibition, 2004; Currents, Group Exhibition, 1997.

2 Robert Leonard, “Peripheral Vision” in Julian Dashper and Friends (New Zealand: City Gallery Wellington, 2016). 

3 Personal conversation with the artist, May 2016.

4 Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power” in Arts Magazine, v. 64, no. 5, (January 1990).

5 For a sociological analysis of the zombie figure as a metaphor for alienation, and an analysis of the pressure applied to recent artistic practice and spectatorship brought about by the capitalization of creativity, see Lars Bang Larsen's “Zombies of Immaterial Labour: The Modern Monster and the Death of Death” in e-flux Journal (2010): http://www.e-flux.com/journal/zombies-of-immaterial-labor-the-modern-monster-and-the-death-of-death/ 

6 Personal conversation with the artist, June 2016.

7 The work of art historian and curator Lars Bang Larsen to recuperate these figures and integrate them into contemporary art history is particularly important. Larsen also connects these figures with the emerging field of what he calls 'new occult art'. See for example, “The Other Side” in Fine Print Magazine (2015): http://www.fineprintmagazine.com/the-other-side/

8 See Walter Robinson's “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism” in Artspace Magazine (3 April 2014): http://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/the_rise_of_zombie_formalism-52184 'Zombie Formalism' should not be confused with 'Zombie Modernism', the latter being coined by Jeffery Keedy in an essay on Postmodern design. See “Zombie Modernism” in Emigre 34: The Rebirth of Design (1995). Keedy critiqued contemporary typography's anachronistic adherence to formalist design principles. Both Keedy and Robinson's critiques champion richer and more complex relationships between form and content.

From the series 16:9, Sydney Non Objective, 4 – 26 February 2012

Phillips, Bruce E. (2012, Feb 1). Painting Obsolescence [exhibition text]

The desire of innovation and consumerism is an insatiable drive that finds its justification in both market trends and the hunger for technological advancement. Our consumption of products is sold to us through the promise of attaining symbolic cultural status, inclusion or enriched lifestyle. Yet the acquisition of such intangible outcomes are always fleeting, for every season or year we witness a new product or fashion that redefines these socio-cultural codes. In this system the new and refined are celebrated and the old and redundant are shunned. This is no more apparent than in the recent developments in television design. In its present incarnation the flat screen television presents a veritable intersection between art and design and the language of minimalist painting. Hanging on a wall with the monochromatic sublime of an Ad Reinhardt and the gleam of a Donald Judd, there is no question that the minimalism of the 1960s onwards has influenced the design of these objects. However, rather than attempting to attain a refined gestalt or some sort of ideal Platonic form, the drive for this design aesthetic is to be an adornment of sophistication and technological innovation.

By re-absorbing modernist and minimalist influences from mass-produced products, Matt Henry participates in complex systems of cultural and commercial value. In this process, a distinction is made between that which is appropriated for symbolic value and that which is designed with understanding. This distinction recognises the hand-in-hand role that artists and designers have had in the development of modernism and minimalism, but also considers the shift in ideological significance due to mass production. Modernist and minimalist influences found in consumer products, more often than not, are used as a veneer in which symbolic cultural capital is invested rather than formal enquiry.

It is in this conflict of aesthetic motivation, between minimalist art and industrial design, that Henry's practice intercedes. Taking interest in various forms, from humble architectural fixtures and domestic appliance design, Henry creates hyper-real abstract paintings. His chosen forms which range from ovens, hi-fi systems, fire alarms and circuit board casing, are critically considered for their reductive integrity.

Henry transforms these familiar objects into the ideological 'purity' of hard-edge modernist abstraction using only the materials conventionally associated with painting. These paintings are not only to be regarded as autonomous objects. They also engage with space in a similar way to early minimalism. Through considered placement, Henry groups paintings to act in site-specific capacities by intervening into the given architectonic logic of a space, often exposing inherent imperfections or idiosyncrasies of the space.

The inquiry into the tainted ideologies of modernism and minimalism is now well familiar, due to the parody by post-minimalist artists of the late 1990s such as Damien Hirst and Tom Friedman. In comparison, Henry's approach is more akin to those artists whose enquiries came to see the obvious sympathy between artistic ideology and the commercial. Key influences include New Zealand artists such as Billy Apple and Julian Dashper, whose practices added greatly to the commercial and institutional impact on painting. More closely aligned to Henry in generation and approach is the work of Francis Baudevin, whose paintings 'faithfully replicate [at large-scale] abstract geometric motifs culled from industrial packaging,' primarily pharmaceutical goods.1 Akin to Baudevin's approach, Henry's work investigates the conversion of aesthetic value as it undergoes semiotic translation between art, design and consumerism. This position is empathetic 'towards the cultural product of modernity' and neutralises any attempt at idealistic mystery behind the abstract.2

The 16:9 series encapsulates many of these nuances. Since 2008, Henry has expanded the series to investigate the ability to create believable mimesis as well as unpacking the design and engineering logic of these desired consumer products. In these works great investigation into limited materials has taken place. Custom machined frame mouldings, bulletproof glass, methods of mounting canvas stretchers and various hues and pigments have been experimented with to achieve the illusion of depth and sharp geometry that are synonymous with industrial manufacturing. These investigations have revealed interesting anomalies of the technology and the material conventions of painting. Of this, the development and invention of different picture aspect ratios used in the film and television industry deserve mention. In abstract form Henry draws attention to the visual impact of these arbitrary formats within the frame of a television's native ratio. The black banding or cropping that occurs on real televisions is highlighted in crisp contrast between incandescent yellows or greens and carefully chosen dark grey. A wry gesture that associates the compositional restraint of colour and shape in the history of abstract painting and a brash technological foible that most would overlook.

Most importantly the 16:9 series, considered in its entirety, explores the notion of obsolescence both in terms of redundancy but also progress and desire. Indeed, the trend for flat screen televisions is a textbook example of consumerism. The 16:9 series charts this insatiable consumerist drive through the development of the flat screen television - from the bulky plasma monitor and home theatre system to the latest slim-line LED screen. However, as an artistic enquiry it is intentionally problematic, as it is only as relevant as Henry's ability to convincingly replicate and riff off the new technological advancements within the convention of painting. In this pursuit the artist will always be painting in the shadow of obsolescence determined by market trends and the unsustainable desire for the new.

Bruce E. Phillips

1 Stroun, Fabrice. "Francis Baudevin." Frieze Magazine. Issue 75, May 2003.
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/francis_baudevin/

2 Nickas, Bob. Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting abstraction, p184. New York: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2009.

Southside Arts Festival: Matt Henry – User Friendly

Atticus, Todd. (2011, Nov 1). Southside Arts Festival: Matt Henry – User Friendly [Web log]. Retrieved from http://spindlemagazine.com/2011/11/from-southside-arts-festival%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8-matt-henry-user-friendly/

The Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts is positioned rather inconspicuously behind an ugly collection of shops and businesses in the Pakaranga region of Manukau. From its many purposes and aims Te Tuhi is most notable for its robust and exciting exhibitions programme. A quick dive into its archive of previous exhibitions reveals a wealth of diverse and challenging art. It is a veritable diamond in the rough.
The gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of new works by Auckland-based artist Matt Henry. User Friendly is an installation of nine paintings across three gallery spaces.

Henry divides and sites his work so as to make bold interventions to the space. Playing with the conventions of exhibition display and art production, his series mimics and references modern consumable items. The unconventional positioning of the canvases further distorts their roles and the objects – at the whim of considerations such as height and juxtaposition – morph into their domestic doppelgängers before your eyes. A canvas mimicking the 16:9 ratio of a flat screen television is hung identically to its functional counterparts; ditto the long Untitled horizontal 600 x 1800 (Titanium White) as a radiator (the lack of romance in Henry’s titling gloriously enhances the effect).

But there is more than mere optical-trickery at work here. The paintings are sleek, attractive objects in their own right. Henry creates smooth surface textures through a meticulous application of acrylic paint. In doing so he references minimalist aesthetics as well as imbuing these signifiers with a resonating visual appeal.

The three boxy rooms that the exhibition spans offer a perfect opportunity for comparative and complementary groupings. In a similar manner to the methodology of artist Roni Horn (successive repetitions, alterations and arrangements), Henry has utilised the space to perform a series of “about-faces”. Through a recalibration of similar forms, he ekes out a sense of immutability in the space itself and hints at the potentiality inherent in the construct of arrangement.

Henry’s is an understated and intelligent commentary. One that is drawn as much to reasoning about the phenomenon of design as it is to art production itself. It may seems contradictory to suggest that such strong visual statements offer subtleties, but the deliberated manner of their dissemination and their collective muteness ground them.

I had an opportunity earlier today to talk to Matt about his work.

Todd Atticus: Your practice blurs the line between painting and sculpture. What arena do you see your work inhabiting?

Matt Henry: I don’t really look at my practice from a discipline area, just as the work references – or blurs – the histories of art and design. I believe this is primarily because much of my interest lies outside of the art historical, somewhere in the semiotics of certain forms and their attendant knowledge or values in a contemporary context.

TA: For me, the objects both fuse and betray any linkage between what they gesture toward (domestic consumable goods, furniture etc.) and what they are in themselves (art objects). They behave separate of art historical principles that would otherwise engulf their purpose. Do you see the gallery space itself playing a role in the experience of these objects?

MH: The gallery can perhaps be seen as a stage where the objects I elude to (the consumable item, appliance) might betray themselves (or their utility) and exist in a purely aesthetic form. The gallery asks no more of them. This makes the gallery (as well as the discipline of painting) interesting as a point about which the emphasis shifts from function toward form and language.

TA: I find the conventions of the gallery space provide an opportunity to assess under different terms. This removal from the hubris of reality suspends objects in a vacuum, allowing them to be contemplated as separate. Under this form of aesthetic scrutiny and transformation, your paintings display their real-life counterparts as foreign bodies; sleek, unassuming, yet obstinately alluring as to be almost fetishist in quality.

MH: Minimalism in design can be quite brutal. It can also be contemplative and meditative. The appeal of minimalism to the average marketing person might be to play up to notions of exclusivity or even propriety. It can be very conservative in a funny way. The form and language of modernism within the vernacular of consumer culture and within art presents a transgression of sorts.

TA: The gallery space – itself a minimalist venture – can singularly cleanse and repel. By removing all signals of authorship or individuality, the effect can seem either universal or alien.

In a way, the pieces in User Friendly have this universal quality: they are shorthand for accepted entities. How mindful are you of those other universals that you are exhibiting alongside? Plug sockets? Light switches? They seem to enter the fray under similar terms.
MH: There is a universalism in the notion – a wall is a wall is a wall – and a lot of interior design and architecture are themselves exercises in minimalism. You could argue that plugs, sockets and fittings are detritus; annoying distractions. I’ve always accepted them as part of the gallery, often playing-off of them compositionally.

Occasionally I’ve photographed work in my home. The effect of this context on the reading of an object is exaggerated, sometimes delightful. I’ve been apprehensive at times to give some work over to the gallery. Sometimes those light switches and fittings give it back.

The ‘character’ of a space is something I’m quick to exploit, and most galleries have it in abundance. I have to admit I prefer more intimate galleries with volumes that approximate domestic or office spaces.

TA: You are sharing the gallery space with another work at Te Tehi: Lisa Crowley’s The Reading Hall. It is a complimenting arrangement: Crowley’s films make enquiries to architectural character, systems of display and gently comment about its subject through the very material of the work’s construction [she captures the movements and intricacies of a 1950’s linotype machine using a 16mm film and documents the contemporary use of Russia’s Vyborg Library in a digital format].

MH: It’s an interesting pairing. They both appear to consider language and processes that are, to some extent, obsolete.

The very physical, ‘slow’ and contemplative process of my painting, as well as playing with history, is intrinsic to the creative process and to the thinking involved. Very much at odds with the speed of contemporary media.

Matt Henry: User Friendly at Te Tehi Centre for the Arts is open until 6th November 2011.

Image courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite, Auckland

Artforum.com Critics’ Picks
Matt Henry: Starkwhite, 510 Karangahape Road, April 16 – May 16

Wilson, Michael. (2009, May 6). Artforum.com Critics’ Picks [Web log], Retrieved from http://artforum.com/archive/id=22738

Making elegant use of two adjacent mirror-image rooms, Matt Henry’s “Doppelgänger” presents a tidy cluster of new paintings and objects that riff on the visual similarity of contemporary high-tech product design and Judd-era sculptural Minimalism. In his first solo exhibition at the K Road staple, the native New Zealander blurs function into form, abstracting home-cinema gear to produce a set of mute postmodern totems with the hermetic gleam of John McCracken slabs. Placing three small MDF and Formica-veneer boxes on the floor of one room and a larger black block in the other, the young artist completes this knowingly spare installation with a pair of monochrome canvases, one nearly black and tinted with zinc white, the other a high-key electric green, glazed and framed in dark wood.
In his 2007 outing at the Fishbowl in New Plymouth, Henry exploited that gallery’s architectural peculiarity (originally a garage, it was converted into a sealed storefront via the addition of a street-facing glass wall) to amplify his project’s blend of bold geometry with wry domestic references. At Starkwhite, he exercises a similar strategy, responding to the interior’s polished serenity with a tongue-in-cheek homage to the culture of high-def surround sound. “Doppelgänger” sees the artist poke subtle fun at consumerist status anxiety by aligning high-street commodities with more rarefied goods. He also contributes a minor but engaging—and seamlessly realized—subset to the history of aesthetic cross-pollination between the formal and the functional, further teasing us with the fact that we can’t always tell one from the other.

Michael Wilson

Realistic Sculptures or Abstract Paintings? - Matt Henry: Contraflow,STARKWHITE, Auckland, 21 June - 17 July 2010

Hurrell, John. (2010, 24 June). Realistic Sculptures or Abstract Paintings? [Web log].
Retrieved from http://eyecontactsite.com/2010/06/realistic-sculptures-or-abstract-paintings

In his first show in Starkwhite's big downstairs gallery Matt Henry continues his characteristic teasing out of similarities between minimalist abstraction and high-tech heating or home entertainment audio/visual equipment. This new precise installation tightly references various aspects of the Starkwhite room whilst also referring to fashionably elegant consumerist products that are coincidentally similar to the works of Judd, Baer or McCracken.
To do this - through meticulous positioning and the works' measurements - he alludes to certain features of the room's architecture and its trimmings, like skirting boards, power-points, a fire alarm and the thin grouting lines that traverse the floor. The paintings in some ways are like furniture, having specially designed features reminiscent of the hinged flaps of dining tables that can extend their horizontal planar surface. Some of the square works have differently coloured, lower rectangular strips.
Also the sides of the linen stretchers, their thicknesses, and the way the paint curves over the edges of the front plane, are crucial elements. So too are the negative spaces between the works, they often being repeated modules based on a reiterated square canvas unit. This sets up a pulse that hints that the entire room wall surface and ceiling is a gridded matrix.
All Henry's painted (or unpainted) linen panels are obsessively crafted, from the fastidious construction of the stretcher and the way it is fastened to the gallery wall, to the very controlled covering of the surface with acrylic or size. In fact there is a double-binding hermeticism about the project that hints no other space might ever be appropriate to contain these almost holy objects, not only through its different proportions but also through its lesser purity and inevitably inadequate pristine cleanliness. Something perhaps impossible to attain.
The title Contraflow also alludes to purity, a Modernist going against the Postmodernist grain, a determined but futile counter-charge using realism and a consumer narrative as a ploy.
Upstairs in one of the small Starkwhite galleries overlooking K' Rd, is a suite of eight much more chromatically buoyant Henry works based on cassette shapes. These are hung in a row and don't refer to the room at all - apart from the whiteness of its wall - only their own proportions, sides and vertical thicknesses. They use cleverly isolated strips of vibrant colour to seduce, but they are combined with nuanced internal placement and a collectively driving finger-snapping rhythm.
These gorgeous pocket-sized paintings, and the urbane installation downstairs, are extremely accomplished projects. In my view, easily the best shows on in Auckland right now.

John Hurrell

Reviews & Press Links

Double Grammar Zone
https://www.photoforum-nz.org/blog/double-grammar-zone-matt-henry
https://photoop.nz/editions
https://eyecontactmagazine.com/2022/06/matt-henry-photographs
Personal Recordings
http://goyacurtain.com/personal-recordings.php
https://www.starkwhite.co.nz/matt-henry-with-madoka-kouno-at-goya-curtain-tokyo/
https://www.starkwhite.co.nz/exhibition/matt-henry-analogues/
Long Division
https://eyecontactmagazine.com/2016/11/matt-henrys-govett-installation
https://govettbrewster.com/exhibitions/matt-henry-long-division
https://www.artforum.com/uploads/guide.003/id30004/press_release.pdf
High fidelity
https://ocula.com/art-galleries/starkwhite/exhibitions/high-fidelity/
Contraflow
https://ocula.com/art-galleries/starkwhite/exhibitions/vernacular-painting/
From the series 16:9
http://www.sno.org.au/sno78
Painting Obsolescence