The following interview was held in conjunction with the artist's exhibition, 'Brilliant Corners' with the Dishman Art Museum located at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. The interview consisted of written response and spoken conversation held in the artist's Bushwick, Brooklyn studio.
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| Matthew Neil Gehring in his Bushwick, Brooklyn studio |
Caleb De Jong: Where
are you from and how has that environment shape your sensibilities?
Matthew Neil Gehring: I’m from
the Midwest. I grew up in Evansville, Indiana, which is about five hours due
south of Chicago. I have a certain sense of space and a sense of how things are
near or far that have certainly influenced my sensibilities. Growing up in the
Midwest has had an impact on my sense of space; I think I could say that I have
not ever been able to shake a sense of geometry that comes from the Midwest. I
think there are things about the architecture of the Midwest that sticks with
you and influences your sense of composition. I think the architecture of
farmland, silos, grain bins, industrial buildings that dot the farmland have
marked my sensibilities. The aerial views of those spaces are amazing and have
influenced my understanding of composition.
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| The artist's Bushwick, Brooklyn studio |
For example, one small piece from this body of
work was exhibited at the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art in New
Harmony, Indiana. This is a cool
place. It’s near my hometown and is the
site of a former utopian society, the Harmonists. It’s a very small town that is in large part
a historic preservation site. It is a
place with a mystical feeling. There are
two amazing pieces of architecture there; the Athenaeum by Richard Meier and the
Roofless Church by Phillip Johnson, an architect I love. Johnson's building is
a big part of the mystical feeling of the place. The building's footprint is large, maybe as
large as city block, and is a roofless, open-air structure that is a
non-denominational gathering place. It
connects the earth and sky in a palpable way.
I love spending time there.
CD How did this current exhibition come about?
MNG Megan Young, the director of the
Dishman Art Museum at Lamar University invited me to do the show. This is a new
body of work. It is the first time the work has been shown as a whole, and the
first showing for the large paintings. I’ve included six new sculptures and we
are building a large 13-foot tall color monolith on site. I am very excited about this. Also included are 72 paintings and drawings,
all from the last two years.
CD How does this new body of work compare to your previous work?
MNG Years ago I remember leaving
graduate school with the exhilarating sensation that came from realizing a
post-studio ideal. I was free to make my work anywhere, at any time, with
anything, or with nothing. I worked with
ideas and with the things at hand. I
designed projects that I could execute during airplane flights and recorded
statements on a cassette recorder while driving. I altered things in their environments and
documented them. I began photographing
all of my accidents; a spilled a drink, a dropped pencil, moved an object.
These works were all very conceptual, and ephemeral and in retrospect very much
drawn from the external and set in deliberate opposition to my internal feeling
or natural interests. I realized also that the formal tendencies I had been working
to eschew (I had come to accept the "irrelevancy" of formalism) were
ever-present. Most of the work from this time is geometric, planar
(horizontal), and rich in color. About two years ago I began to really think
about color, what color is and what it can mean. During this time I began
to read Goethe's Theory of Color,
which is a long series of experiments the author does with color. I was
thinking about my former interest in my previous work, work that was sculptural
and conceptual in nature and that dealt with notions of absence and how these
notions could be captured in color. Presently I am thinking about existence and
non-existence and the intersection of form and formlessness. Reading Goethe
helped me realize the deeply subjective nature of color. This work is really
the result of that investigation. When I moved to New York six years ago, my
creative process took a shift. I went
from having access to vast facilities to working in a small room. I also moved from being a more project and
process based artist to developing a studio painting practice.
CD What materials
do you use in your paintings, drawings and sculptures?
MNG I mainly use linen or cotton duck
canvas on strainer stretcher bars, or linen glued onto panel. Sometimes I'll
paint directly onto a prepared wood support panel. I make small works with
gouache painted on paper that is mounted on wood panels, and drawings with ink
and gouache on paper.
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| The artist's work table with unfinished work |
CD How does this work express your particular set of values and sensibilities
as an artist?
MNG I think that there is a great
freedom within a focused practice and the parameters of my natural tendencies,
tendencies that have been with me since my earliest work. In a sense this body
of work has similarities to artwork I made in college. The painter Thornton
Willis said in an interview two things that intrigued me, recently. He said that you really only ever make one
painting, but for various reasons you need to keep working on new supports. I’m paraphrasing. He also said that the profound thing about
being an artist is that the art you create stands as your assertion of what you
think art should be. I like these
ideas. There is slow growth here. And
there is a real stake in it. There are works that I made in undergrad in the
early nineties that share a lot of the formal sensibilities of this work. This is interesting for me to think
about. In many ways, I began as a
student with a primary interest in formal work, and I have loved reductive
abstract painting and sculpture for as long as I can remember. The new
paintings here in Beaumont are formal and they are focused in an extended
investigation of a small number of variables and relationships. I am interested in making relatively small
moves, where in the past I felt compelled to make significant shifts, large
conceptual declarations, from piece to piece.
CD What compels
you to make paintings?
MNG Painting is the least like
something else in the visual world. I think that painting offers a format for
working which is distinctly different and apart from everything that is not
art. It does not share similarity with other aspects of life that say, video or
sculpture does. Video shares its form
with entertainment, YouTube, documentary, etc.
Sculpture is an object similar to other objects. It relates to them, and competes with them in
certain spatial ways. Sometimes there is
even a merger – “functional sculpture, functional art”. Sculpture's essential nature, form, is intimately
connected to architecture’s essential nature – space. For me, painting, especially the kinds of
painting that I make, are the most autonomous things that can be made. It connects to history, but painting's
history specifically, and it connects to the spirit of the time in which it was
made. Painting demands, and I hope my painting demands, rapt still attention.
CD Why do you create art specifically rather than post YouTube videos or work
in entertainment?
MNG Art has a specific and poetic means
of establishing a position in relationship to society. Artists establish their own sets of
values. For me that’s what is at the
core of this. As an artist I value Improvisation and engagement in the moment,
quality over quantity, poetry over the literal, beauty over the practical,
creativity over consumption, inquiry over entertainment, the long journey, the
process, the experiment, the question over the answer. Art is the only thing
worth getting out of bed for. I have
never in my life seriously entertained doing anything else.
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Matthew Neil Gehring
Victor
Oil on linen
72 x 84 inches
2013 |
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Matthew Neil Gehring
And the Vital Vigor
Stood Its Ground
Oil on linen
90 x 782013 |
