SUICIDE SPECIALS - COLLAGE WORKS ON PAPER - 2013

Click on any work to generate a slide show.  Info: Suicide Specials.

12:05

12:05, collage on board. 2004.  See it at the Saatchi Gallery.

TWO BEST SELLERS, 1990.

TWO BEST SELLERS, 1990. Private collection, East Hampton, NY. #BESTSELLERS

Mouthing Off: Immaculate Perception, Uncouth Vermouth by the Mindful In This Month's Edition of Food & Wine

Immaculate Perception, my collage work, is featured on Uncouth Vermouth's Dry-Hopped Vermouth.  The new Vermouth received serious play in Food & Wine this month. 

The Calm Gallery is offering the work as a limited edition signed 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. 

 

Immaculate Perception measures 80 cm by 60 cm and is printed on fine art paper in a limited edition of 50 signed and numbered prints.  There are only a dozen or so remaining."

 

See: Immaculate Perception at The Calm Gallery.

Monet

Baseball World Series - Rubens Rounding Third

Rubens Rounding Third – a limited edition baseball stamp art work, signed and numbered.  All information : The Calm Gallery.


The Autumn Classic is the culmination of America’s national pastime – The World Series takes place every October and brings together the best players on the best teams from across the United States and Canada.  The bat and ball game can seem a bit silly.  A man dressed in a colorful uniform with a team name sewn into his shirt – names after birds (Cardinals), thieves (Pirates), fairy tale creatures (Giants) and even heavenly creatures (Angels)– with each team representing a city from Seattle to Miami and those in between: Kansas City, Atlanta, Cincinnati among others.

The World Series is a best-of-seven game contest of inches played out over what could be hours of not very much happening.  But when it does, watch out.

As a boy growing up in New York, I played baseball every day.  With my friends Mark and Geoff and Kenny and the girls Beth and Lori and Jamie, we’d mimic the big leagues self-hitting the ball across streets and yards while members of the other team would chase the ball down (sometimes in hedges, under cars or even fighting dogs for it!).  Meanwhile we would speed around the bases – squares drawn on the asphalt.  It was a childhood love affair that continues today.

In 2008 I produced a collage work that combined a baseball player in full flight, rounding third base on his way home; however he takes a glance back to see a half-naked woman – his second wife Helene Fourment, wearing nothing but a swath of fur.  The work was an instant hit and sold to a collector in Atlanta.  Some months later, Chicago-based artist-stamp genius Michael Hernandez de Luna, wrote me about a contest on the theme of baseball for the Philatelic Museum of Oaxaca, Mexico: "Send them a stamp sheet."  I quickly turned Rubens Rounding Third into a stamp sheet and produced a signed and limited edition of the the work.  The piece was awarded first prize ($5000) in their world wide competition for 'Baseball Philately + The Art Inspired by Philately'.

Rubens Rounding Third is already a hit with baseball fans across the US and even in the cricket-crazy UK. The stamp sheet is printed on gummed and perforated paper; each is signed and numbered (limited edition of 1000). 

Rubens Rounding Third is an unusual art work celebrating a great game in a titillating fashion. A perfect gift for your baseball mad friends or relatives in America and beyond.
 

Mad Men, 2013

Mad Men, 2013.  Collage on canvas.  53 x 73 cm. See it on Saatchi.

Barcelone 1996

Barcelone, 1996, collage on board. Exhibited in Paris: Rose Lave Plus Blanc, 1996; God & Country, 2011.  The collage measure 19.7 x 23.6 inches. Included are two dozen or more Gauloises packages (filter tipped and non-filters!), which were still quite popular in France when this piece was produced.  The drawing on the upper left hand part of the collage is an American Indian Chief statue who cast a shadow from a store window in Barcelona.  I traced the work standing in the street just as the sun was setting through the store windows (you had to be there). 

See the work on Saatchi Online.

A BOOK ABOUT DEATH AUSTRALIA : THE OZ POSTER

My poster produced for A Book About Death Australia, the 27th exhibition in the global project, A Book About Death.  ABAD Australia is curated by Heather Matthew and Julie Barratt.  See: ABAD AUSTRALIA for all details.

This work derives from my collage book, Days Like These (2009-2010); the image is a printable file and can be taken from this page to print at home, office, or even put on your city's walls (if you like).  If you would like a larger file to print larger, simply e mail me and I'll send you one by e mail.

Contact: ABAD OZ.

The Calm Gallery London : Alphabets & Prints. An In Studio Interview with Haley & Lucas on Oh My Superfly

Haley and Lucas run the exquisite Calm Gallery, an online gallery and seller of prints based in London. I have worked with them from years; more than a dozen of my prints are on their site and in a recent interview with Fanni of Oh My Superfly, you can see a few of my works, among them Immaculate Perception and Sparkasse (sold out, sorry), pictured above in The Calm Gallery studio. Haley & Lucas have a half dozen of my prints in stock – Take a look here.

Read the full interview: Meet the Superfly Creatives: The Calm Gallery.

See The Calm Gallery here.

KOLAJ Magazine

Read the article on Kolaj Magazine Online.

On Confessions, Indiscretions & Spelling With Scissors

The Confessions, Obsessions and Indiscretions of Matthew Rose: An Interview

By Patti Verbanas

Matthew Rose’s “Confessions, Obsessions and Indiscretions” May 9 -June 14, 2009 at SOMA Gallery, Cape May, New Jersey. 

Matthew Rose, an American artist living in Paris, has been “spelling with scissors” for more than 25 years. Trained in semiotics and linguistics, Rose creates works — often exhibited in a wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling display — that challenge viewers’ perception of the interrelationships between seemingly disparate objects and words.

I spoke with Matthew Rose on the eve of his opening to discuss the inspiration behind the works presented in “Confessions, Obsessions, and Indiscretions” — a range of pieces including surrealist prints, drawings on paper, text works, paintings, large collage works on canvas, and, as Rose describes them, “terribly unusual objects.” “I wouldn’t say they are naughty, but they are certainly provocative,” he notes.

What is the theme of “Confessions, Obsessions & Indiscretions?”

MR: The work concerns multiple — actually thousands — of secret messages about myself and, by extension, the world we all inhabit. They are not therapeutic works. They are about everyday life when it’s mashed up, which is perhaps its natural, somewhat entropic, state. The exhibition is also an invitation to others to not only participate in my chaotic theory of everything, but to participate by extension in theirs — no matter how strange.

What are your obsessions and do you have any confessions that you divulge in this show?
MR: My confessions? I fear the real meaning in all this work is my death — even the sexy pieces, the funny pieces — and the absurdity of sex and love. How terrifying it all is. But I try to make myself laugh and see what my mind sees.

Where you do derive inspiration for your subjects?

MR: I just walked down the street to a cafe in my neighborhood in Paris and noticed how the sidewalk, once marked up with bright white arrows telling dog owners to move their pups to the curb for their pooping, is now a bit of chop suey, with only bits of the arrows remaining after some hole was dug or some pipe laid into the street and asphalt relaid. It’s quite beautiful, time working its collage magic on the world. I try to do that, but of course, toss in all my personal nonsense. So I’ll start with some element of an advertisement, a logo, picture of a bottle or can, or a discolored piece of paper and connect, distort, and build them out and up, until the work sings, and says, “I’m finished.” Perhaps months later I go back to it and see that I’ve tricked myself and hit it with steel wool or shower hose and see what happens. You have to murder your work from time to time to see what’s really there.

Tell us about how you “spell with scissors.”

MR: I cut out meaning and color (a pair of blue eyes from some Weimar general, some girl’s red hair from 1930s America, a bone in a jar of water) and make essays and novels out of them. Then I toss up the “phrases” and let them fall. They begin to behave like nouns and verbs and objects.

What does the medium of collage allow you to do that other art forms do not?

MR: Collage allows me to say things rapidly and see the world how it really could be (or is). It’s like speaking and reflects my consciousness in a way that other mediums do not. I use paint, pencil, paper, and canvas all the time, and will forego collage if there is some place I need to get to.

I do all these things to see what they look like, and oftentimes they are truly curious. In “Immaculate Perception” I cut out the head of a little girl from a French knitting magazine from the 1930s. I loved it; she looked down and away and had a lovely bobby haircut. I walked around in my studio with this little head for a while until I remembered an illustration of a lemon tree I’d cut out of another French book on fruit plants. I put them together, and it was very satisfying. I could never have connected them by paint. I needed the physical objects, the color before my eyes, the ideas they each presented for me to marry them. It’s quite simple, and for me a lemon and a little girl will never be the same. It’s a bit different with another collage I made, “LeMon,” which steals a fashion photo of a woman, a slice-and-dice of the logo of the French newspaper Le Monde, a blue ZERO, and some yellow paint. It’s “LeMon,” now and the woman has “blue lips” (from the lemon). It’s sexy and very strange. Collage is the world colliding with you.

What can you tell us about your novel, Plan B, which you will read from at the gallery on opening night?

MR: Plan B is a novel about my confessional, obsessional, and extremely indiscrete anti-hero, Von Spatzl. He is Dada incarnate. I wrote it over the course of two years, creating a parallel book in images — in fact, Von Spatzl’s collages and drawings. Von Spatzl is a lost and suicidal fantasist, who after failing repeatedly to kill himself goes off to play chess, writes novels and, in his search for quality discovers the Austrian Girl, an ex-call girl who plays Omm Pah Pah music on her accordion. The adventures continue in a cut-and-paste fashion, with Von Spatzl trading stocks in the late 20th century and making a fortune in his tiny, dusty house in Flushtown, America. His accomplishment is to send piles of cash to his mother in Florida, lose contact with the world, and disappear into the fog after he has buried his night and day journals in his back yard. It is a black novel that borrows from William Burroughs’ cut-up books and my own collage methods. It’s dark, but funny. Whenever I read it to people they laugh nervously — but they do laugh. I offered it as a free download on my website: http://matthewrosestudio.net/

When did you know you wanted to be an artist?

MR: It’s not as if I wanted to be an artist, but simply something I’ve always done — made things with my hands for my eyes to see and my brain to consider. Maybe I didn’t have a choice, but as soon as I could see (and remember) I found myself fascinated with color, texture, lines and objects, and quantities of objects and how they all seemed to shift around to draw out different meanings. Looking/reading is my favorite thing to do, so I suppose I’m an aesthetic by nature. As a child I liked how a slice of hard, acid orange-colored cheddar cheese sat on an innocent slice of white bread. I would write letters to people and saw my words as visual units. They spoke to me these combinations, connections. And when my wonderful Aunt Selma took me to see van Gogh’s exhibition in Brooklyn when I was 7 years old, I was hooked by his blue skies and pink almond tree blossoms. Strange beauty. I began to see in a new way and make my own skies and almond trees, albeit ones quite different than van Gogh’s. I lived this way as a kid, and still do — super-conscious, and exhausted by it all.

What artists have influenced your work? What keeps you from being derivative?

MR: There are many artists in my life, but the world and the street is my greatest teacher. The stuff that washes up on my doorstep, the accidents, the events that happen in a blink. Like today, I saw a woman get hit by a car. But she claimed she wasn’t hit. I saw her flip in the air. After I helped her up from the street, I listened to her, the driver, and the other witnesses discuss the event. She seemed all right, and after 10 minutes she got on a bus and disappeared back into the world. Like a letter mailed to no one. On the street were the scuff marks of her boots. Traffic returned to normal.

My late friend Ray Johnson, himself a great collage artist, gave me a way of looking and reading that has stayed with me ever since: Synchronicity. (Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events, which are casually unrelated occurring together in a supposedly meaningful manner.) I see artists from all of history talking to me in this way — from the cave scribblers in Lascaux to Michelangeolo, Hogarth, and Manet. There’s the odd realism of Schwitters and odd optics and games of Duchamp. The energetic acrobatics of Rauschenberg and the cool detachment of Jasper Johns. The shamanistic conundrums of Yves Klein and Pierro Manzoni, and the Fluxus group. I suppose the poetic discourses of Cornell and Ray Johnson have had the strongest effects on me — the way they matched disparate pieces of the world together to create something completely new speaks about the strange combination of banality and magic. Birds and boxes, found discards in envelopes. In the end, it’s impossible not to be derivative — art is of this world, there are scuff marks everywhere.

New Jersey Life Lifestyle Editor Patti Verbanas is the former Executive Editor of Art & Antiques magazine.  Matthew Rose's current exhibition, The Letters, is on view from 5 July - 31 August 2013 at Converge Gallery, Williamsport, PA.

ORANGERIE: BACK TO NATURE SAATCHI SHOWDOWN

Orangerie. Collage on board. 39 x 29.5 cm. 2006. Exhibited in Paris, London. A poster was made using this image for Scared But Fresh, Orange Dot Gallery, London, 2010. That poster is free for download in a very high resolution PDF: http://matthewrosestudio.net/

The collage piece, in the Back to Nature "Showdown," was recently sold to a collector in Glasgow, Scotland.  See it here on the Saatchi Online site :

http://www.saatchionline.com/art/Assemblage-Collage-Paper-ORANGERIE/17209/1681501/view

THE LETTERS - CONVERGE GALLERY 5 JULY 31 AUG 2013 ~ THE BIG PICTURE INSTALLATION VIEWS

The Letters, installation views, Converge Gallery, Williamsport, PA. July 5 - August 31, 2013.  If you would like the PDF catalog with installation and individual shots of the 333 works (as well as prices), contact John Yogodzinsky, director, Converge Gallery.

Or write: THE LETTERS THE CATALOG.

THE LETTERS - CONVERGE GALLERY 5 JULY 31 AUGUST

The Letters : Opening 5 July, 2013, Converge Gallery Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

Artist talk: Saturday, 6 July, 7 PM.

The exhibition includes some 333 works on paper, canvas and terribly unusual objects.  See the current catalog of works: The Letters.

Download and print the  exhibition poster (left), free.  High resolution, A3 size (or larger), PDF format :

The Letters (Free Poster).

Please feel free to share this post using the twitter, FB and e mail buttons below. 

How Design Magazine wrote this piece about the exhibition and the work Send Love Letters. 

Flavorwire Article & Slideshow.

The Self Improvement Alphabet Book

A is for Academy, B  is for Butter, C is for Captivate, three of 26 collage on paper works in The Self Improvement Alphabet Book. 

The Self Improvement Alphabet for The Letters at Converge Gallery, Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

The Letters opens on 5 July and runs through 31 August, 2013.

For all information: The Letters - Matthew Rose

To send a Love Letter to the exhibition, click here: LOVE.

THE LETTERS : OPENING 5 JULY 2013 @ CONVERGE GALLERY

Preparation of the online catalog of works for MATTHEW ROSE: THE LETTERS, opening 5 July at Converge Gallery, Williamsport, Pennsylvania.  

See the ongoing catalog: http://thelettersbymatthewrose.tumblr.com/

For more information: http://www.convergegallery.com/portfolio/matthew-rose/

In addition, a mini project within the exhibition: 

SEND LOVE LETTERS TO MATTHEW ROSE

Open invitation to all artists, writers, photographers and lovers of all stripes the world over.

Please send love letters in sealed and stamped envelopes in any language and of any length – using pictures, photos, cutouts, etc –  from any time from now until August 25, 2013. 

Your love letters can be written to anyone about anything in anyway you like, just as long as they arrive in sealed envelopes.  Send as many as you like.  People will love them.

The love letters will be collected and displayed, and distributed to visitors during the exhibition MATTHEW ROSE : THE LETTERS (July 5 - August 31 2013).  The mysterious love letters can be picked up for free to anyone who would like one.  The letters will not be opened during the exhibition but posted on the exhibition web site. 

Anyone can send a love letter, and you don’t have to sign it but you can. Just know that someone will leave the gallery with your letter.

We hope to have a constant stream of letters from all over the world throughout the exhibition. Each love letter will be rubber stamped with a special logo for the exhibition. 

Please send your love letters to:

MATTHEW ROSE
℅ Converge Gallery
140 West Fourth Street
Williamsport, Pennsylvania
17701  United States of America

AND PLEASE ASK YOUR FRIENDS TO SEND A LOVE LETTER …. THANK YOU!