Fantasy : Musée Magazine

Musée Magazine published a few works of mine in their "Fantasy" issue (No. 108), this winter, featuring several emerging artists.  The three pieces were all collage works on paper including Immaculate Perception, Days Like These and A Perfect Friend, the latter two images of books of collages of the same name.  I was asked about the relationship of photography to my work but that text was not published. My response was directed more towards current work but it applies to these works as well as they implicate and recycle photography in different ways.  

On Photography & Collage

I’m not a photographer.  But some years ago I developed some double exposures from a cheap plastic camera – the images I discovered were accidents – the film did not advance as it should have. I’d printed out a contact sheet, and had a half dozen produced large and in color. Prior to that I’d taken a photograph of my niece. She was a baby, sitting on the kitchen floor playing with bowls and spoons. I printed the photo and then cut out her silhouette, which flattened all her features.  Some thought the “baby” was a “thalidomide” baby.  That silhouette formed the basis of a collage series that spanned nearly 10 years – I used the silhouette as a kind of light to illuminate other images and surfaces; it shaped ideas, and gave a supra-impression of  a full range of ideas, extending even to mosaics and sculpture. 

As I’ve expanded my range of collage subjects and techniques, the photograph has become a support in many interesting ways.  For one I’ve come to regard most magazine images I use – as well as photocopies – as photographs. I find myself intrigued with the magazine and vintage book papers these images are printed on. All printed material, particularly pre-1960, offer rich image possibilities due to the printing technology used. I cut and alter these images, sometimes using paint, sometimes sandpaper, sometimes water. I will sometimes turn them to undecipherable bits; other times using fragments in combination with others – scratching their color away. I’m interested in all sorts of photographed and printed images, and can sometimes hunt for bits of red or blue or yellow for a specific work, combining it so the results are often abstract. Usually the pieces, particularly in the more recent Suicide Specials launch a distilled but many-faceted narrative.

Other works, however, are extremely direct and employ only a handful of elements. I seek out photographs of objects or people that have, with their vintage printing and papers, a faraway, often nostalgic feel.  I’ve come to view photography as something – anything actually – that has been reproduced mechanically using optics and printing technology. And I’ve no issues with reprinting images using my own store of vintage papers – some virgin some already printed.  

Prints for the Immaculate Perception (the girl in the lemon tree) work are still available via Keep Calm Gallery in London, UK.  Click here to see them: Immaculate Perception Keep Calm.

THE END OF THE WORLD in New York City at The Fountain Art Fair - Converge Gallery

THE END OF THE WORLD, COLLAGE ON CANVAS, 50 x 50 CM. 2008.  CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW.

From March 8 - 10, my work will be on view at The Fountain Art Fair with Converge Gallery.  Among the works exhibited will be The End Of The World, a 50 x 50 cm 2008 collage work that has been exhibited widely in the US and London (Keep Calm Gallery).

The Fountain Art Fair: 8 March - 10 March 2013
68 Lexington Avenue at 25th Street, NYC, NY 
Opening Reception: Friday 8 March, 7 PM

Gallery and Fair Info: http://www.fountainartfair.com/exhibitors/converge-gallery/

Uncouth Vermouth : Bianca Miraglia at Underground

 
Uncouth Vermouth, Bianca Miraglia's natural vermouth debuts with my art labels at the Underground exhibition in Bushwick, Brooklyn on Friday August 10, 2012. 

The art labels are borrowed from the A Perfect Friend works and the Immaculate Perception collage – prints of which are featured at Keep Calm Gallery. The prints from A Perfect Friend are on view at Converge Gallery in Williamsport, PA through August 25.

Bianca Miraglia is a craft maker of vermouth and an expert on most things that are both drinkable and involve alcohol.  She has often lectured on wine and spirits and naturally-made microbrew beers. She produced a special batch of her Uncouth Vermouth for Underground.

The collage works above include: Top – Television (2005), Lincoln (2007), The Hunt (2007), The Leaving (2007).  All pieces are available from Converge Gallery.  Sorry, there is no vermouth left from the evening but you might be able to get the bottles if you contact Bianca.  More info about Underground and the gallery : Converge Gallery on FB.

BIRD WATCHING WALL PAPER

Invite Audubon and friends into your home. Have a cup while you check out rare Nepalese species from your kitchen table.  Run a two-inch band of birds in a forest around your bedroom. Dream outloud.

BIRDPAPER, my new wall paper print made for the GOD & COUNTRY exhibition at STORIE PARIS is now available in linear square meters (110 x 90 cm).  The wall paper print will be produced at Burning Boy Press Paris.

DESIGN SPONGE recently wrote about it on their site: DESIGN SPONGE.

Wall to wall to wall installations are available, as well as rolls for do-it-yourself installations in bands or rectangles or squares.  The bird watching wall paper is made to order.

For more information on BIRDPAPER installations, please click:  CONTACT.

Fine art, 30 x 40 cm, signed and dated prints of Birdpaper, are available from : KEEP CALM GALLERY in LONDON.

The End Of The World

THE END OF THE WORLD (REALLY BUILT TO LAST) is Paris-based artist  Matthew Rose's surreal fantasy about the fragility of world we  live in and the end of the world we've built.

"The end of the world is in fact a created fiction with a decidedly real dimension," says the artist. "It's a dream and yet it's one we live in, walk through, sleep off. I'm reminded of James Joyce's famous line: 'History is a nightmare I'm trying to awaken from.'"

Based on an original  collage from 2008, THE END OF THE WORLD, reports from the frontiers of  the real and dream worlds, where foods and animals, naughty little boys  and errant little girls enter into the visual field and run, jump, hang  and float in and around an assortment of human narratives that are  veering dangerously out of control.

This work, and others in the  series, appears in Masters: Collage (Sterling Publishing/Lark Books, USA May  2010). The print is available exclusively from Keep Calm Gallery London.  There are only 45 prints remaining in the edition of 85. Price: £38.00. (Note: The new shipment to Keep Calm is arriving the week of September 20, so be assured there are prints to purchase).

[Click images to enlarge and see detail.]

• Limited edition of 85
• Signed, dated & numbered by the artist
• Giclee print on Hahnemuhle paper
• 290mm by 290mm (11½ by 11½ inches)

The original collage measures 50 x 50 cm, and is available.  Contact Matthew Rose for information.

The remaining 45 prints in the edition were expertly produced by Mariela Cadiz working with Burning Boy Press.  Mariela, based in Paris, produced fine art, grand format ink jet prints for photographers and artists of the highest quality.

You ––> Me : Silkscreen Print

You ––> Me : Silkscreen print, after collage, 47.5 x 38 cm, three colors, on Arches Rives, 300 gram paper. Edition: 100. All signed and numbered.  20 artist proofs were also produced on a variety of fine art papers, along with several prints on fine art papers in gold, silver, and pink.

The print is a little piece of visual poetry, a sort of lexical love song, a Valentine.

The print was published by Burning Boy Press. Burning Boy Press produces mostly high-quality digital prints in Paris.

The original collage, measures 47.5 x 38 cm, dates from 1999.  Exhibited in Berlin at Galerie Tristesse (2006) and in Paris at Bernard Matussière (2009), the original is available for purchase. [Contact for price].

You ––> Me, 2010, was printed at Michel Hosszù's atelier in Paris in a single day.  Photograph of Michel Hosszù (below) taken in front of his massive silkscreen piece "Grimaces" in his studio in the Bastille section of Paris.

Michel Hosszù designed the screens for printing using three separate colors – two shades of gray and one final black.  Together we moved through the edition, racking up the pieces (photo, right), finally playing with the registration for some of the proofs and off-edition works at the end of the day.  The gold, silver and pink pieces were spray painted prior to printing. Two pieces – one gold, one silver – were printed on A3-sized canvases.

Of note: As a boy I was often working with my father in Queens, New York, producing silkscreens for his retail clients.  The screens – some as large as four meters wide and with as many as 28 colors – were beautiful in themselves.  The variety of paints and lacquers and the teamwork needed to pull the giant squeegee across such a giant screens remain potent images in my mind about the process of reproducing images. There is a gorgeous (although somewhat toxic) perfume involved in silkscreening.

As a teenager, I held many jobs in the silkscreen shop, from stretching the dylon fabric over the frames to spreading out the emulsion, position the frame for printing, then blotting out the tiny holes left after the UV printing lamp hit the acetate positive with the image.  Back then the image silhouettes were often cut out of ruby lith, and not punched out of a laser printer via Photoshop file.  It's a process that combines photography, handiwork, low end technology, but with spectacular results.  Sadly, a great deal of silkscreen production has been taken over by digital printing; and while both are wonderful, there is nothing like the creation of a silkscreen print. It's beautiful and delightfully messy.

The YOU --> ME prints are available through Keep Calm Gallery while a few will also be available at my exhibition SCARED BUT FRESH at Orange Dot Gallery in London on October 6, 2010.  

To purchase a YOU --> ME print, please contact Keep Calm Gallery, by clicking here.

Les Affaires

'Les Affaires' is a stunning new limited edition print from Paris based American artist Matthew Rose. It is available exclusively from Keep Calm Gallery in London.

Like a mall from hell and high water, Matthew Rose takes on this vast subject with a surreal tour through the commercial center of his mind with Les Affaires. Expertly produced by Mariela Cadiz and Burning Boy Press in Paris, Les Affaires brings consumption and all its myriad expressions to a neat explosion.

Here, Freud (lower left corner) considers the expansive narratives from behind a silhouette of Popeye-as-Buddah. A family ponders a side of beef, a salesman dangles a naked blue girl in offering from his battery-as-desk (a housewife's head). A child's arms are weighed on a scale. One of a large pair of hands beholds a fashion plate – her own head morphed into a construction of pipes topped by a fan – while the other hand readies a pen for signing over something of value.

Indeed value is explored and remade as acts of gloating, comedy and narcissistic wonder and feeding. Matthew Rose's Les Affaires, a print based upon an enormous collage takes 'business as usual' to startling new heights and frighteningly new depths. "I live on a market street in Paris," says the artist. "This happens every day."

• Limited edition of 100
• Signed, numbered, titled and dated by the artist
• High quality giclee print
• 310gsm Hahnemuhle fine art etching paper
• 750mm by 700mm (29½ by 27½ inches)

Price: £150.00, Unframed.  See more images and order from Keep Calm Gallery.

If you are interested in the original collage on board, Les Affaires, 1.5 x 1.3 m, (2009), click here: Contact. 

Typo-Graphical & Dry Mounted Take On: A Strange Meeting At Keep Calm Gallery

The very nice folks at Typo-Graphical and Dry Mounted, two art and design blogs, pointed out the series now up at Keep Calm Gallery, A Strange Meeting.

Drymounted.com is a lover of all things art," writes the owner. "I hate getting drymounted on a print release because I missed it! As a resource to myself as well as all other print lovers, I like to keep up to date with all print drops."

Drymounted.com is absolutely filled with prints you probably won't see anywhere else.  Great to have them around.  Tons of gorgeous eye candy here.

Typo-Graphical is run by artist John Hall, who has long worked in both the streetwear and magazine industries for about a decade, for some of the best names in the game, including: Mass Appeal, T-world (Australia), Vapors, Missbehave, Woofin’ (Japan), Staple Design, Digital Gravel, Foreign Family, Ludwig and The Hundreds.

Hall lives in Venice, California. He says that he works a combination of interviewing incredibly talented people for the occasional magazine, writing press releases for clothing companies, doing product descriptions for online retail, and once in a while, designing and producing t-shirts," he says. (Typo-Graphical logo, just above).

Check them both out. Both sites are chock-full of wonderful art and design resources.

Rubens Rounding Third: Art Of Baseball

Rubens Rounding Third, A3 size, signed and numbered.  An homage in someways to the great Derek Jeter – a work of art himself!

Printed on gummed paper and perforated, the stamp sheet is the artist's ode to baseball, art, Rubens, stamps in a sexy twist on turning the corner, in this case third base.

This collector's piece has a permanent place at the Philatelic Museum of Oaxaca (MUFI), which awarded me first prize in their world wide competition for 'Baseball Philately + The Art Inspired by Philately'.

• Printed on gummed stamp sheets
• Signed and numbered by the artist
• Limited edition of 1000
  
• 296 mm by 407 mm (11½ by 16 inches)

Available from KEEP CALM GALLERY.  CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE FROM KEEP CALM GALLERY (LONDON).

A Strange Meeting : Suite Of 12 Collage Works

'How To Join' is just one of 12 new collage works in this slightly dangerous, oftentimes sexy and bird-in-hand deadpan series by American artist Matthew Rose.

'How to Join' is an advertisement for a blue and naked man walking his 'bird' – a bemused and bespectacled librarian not-so-secretly observes it all.

Deceptively simple, these collages draw out a fragmented narrative typical of Matthew Rose's work. Words cut and married to a range of odd characters, provide a dozen theatrical one-acts of absurd encounters. In Matthew Rose's world, when parties meet, an emotional oil spill ensues.

"It's a wonderful world," says the artist, "if you can read – and cut and paste – between the lines."
The collection, 'A Strange Meeting,' is the first in a series of original works created for and offered exclusively by Keep Calm Gallery. Matthew Rose's work was recently featured in the just-published MASTERS: COLLAGE (Lark Books/US).

This is an original collage piece by Matthew Rose. As this collage is unique there is just one available.

• Collage on paper
• Signed and dated by the artist
• Stamped by the artist on the reverse
• Acid free paper
• Approximately 305 mm by 230 mm (12 by 9 inches)

Price: £170.00 per work.  Contact Keep Calm Gallery to purchase and to see the full 12-piece suite.

Immaculate Perception: Print

Surrealism, asserted André Breton, was above all "a revolutionary movement."  And that movement, both visual and literary, was largely identified with the dream. Shock, non-sequitur, unlikely but often gorgeous juxtapositions were the signature elements of surrealist works. These ideas come to term in Immaculate Perception by Matthew Rose. 

Beautifully printed by Mariela Cadiz in Paris, the work is a lullaby in the surrealist cannon: A young girl in a bob cut dreams in a dream of a lemon tree. She is the revolution, says the artist. 

Based on a smaller collage, Immaculate Perception is making a second tour of Keep Calm Gallery. This new version measures 80 cm by 60 cm and is printed on fine art paper in an edition of 50. The edition is available exclusively from Keep Calm Gallery (London). Price: £130.00, unframed.

• Limited edition of 50
• Signed, numbered and dated by the artist
• High quality giclee print
• Acid-free fine art paper
• 80 cm by 60 cm (31½ by 23¾ inches)

To find out more about producing high quality digital prints in Paris – prices, technical specifications, papers available – please contact Burning Boy Press: MATTHEW.ROSE.PARIS [at] GMAIL.COM.