“Paradigms: Matt Magee at Manneken Press”, showcases a group of six printed works by Matt Magee in a virtual exhibition presented by Manneken Press. “Paradigms: Matt Magee at Manneken Press” can be viewed from September 16th, 2024 through January 1st, 2025 exclusively on Artsy.
Paradigms: Matt Magee at Manneken Press celebrates the continuum of Magee’s creative relationship with Manneken Press. The artist’s first project with Manneken Press began in 2020, during the the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel to our studio was impossible and a remote form of collaboration was required. Magee returned to Manneken Press in October of 2023, this time in person, to begin work on a second trio of prints.
The abstract, hard-edged forms found in the six prints produced at Manneken Press are seen throughout Magee’s oeuvre. His 2021 prints, Plugs, Bugs and Drugs, were conceived as an abstract poetic triptych that riffs on conceptual notions of language and iterative processes relating to stacking and sequencing. Working in his Scottsdale, AZ studio Magee drew the images directly onto copper plates, leaving space at the margins so formal information became centralized, focused and symbolic. The prints continued to develop over the subsequent months, with additional plate work and color proofing done by mail and via Facetime and telephone conversations.
The editions of Plugs, Bugs and Drugs were released in June of 2021. The forms and their titles are suggestive but non-explicative.
The structures of 2024’s Winter Pool and Mind Gap were inspired by a small painting by Paul Klee titled “Mask”: a central oval form resting on a neck/base sprouts red-orange hair and is striated with orange and yellow lines which form the contours of a face. In Magee’s prints the frontality and flatness of the oval shapes relate to the head-like form in the Klee painting, but the central ovals are filled with a matrix of rectangles which activate the inner peripheries of the forms. The white of un-inked paper is an important aspect of these aquatints; this negative space forms the blocks in Winter Pool, while Mind Gap ’s blocks are positive, floating within the negative space. Magee transmutes Klee’s head shape into thought bubbles with udders – innately linguistic, though in an indecipherable language. The image in Lunar Lantern references a trilobite, the marine arthropod commonly found as a fossil. Stacked slices create a structure that appears to be lit from within. The white of the un-inked white paper also plays an important role in Lunar Lantern, creating the moon slices as negative space surrounded by the purple pigment. The print’s stacked and centered ancient forms create an object of ritual that holds space and light as it rises. The editions of Mind Gap, Winter Pool and Lunar Lantern were released in March 2024.
Plugs, Bugs and Drugs are aquatints hand-printed on Somerset Velvet Soft White paper in editions of 20. Winter Pool, Mind Gap and Lunar Lantern are aquatints hand-printed on Rives BFK white paper in editions of 20. All of Matt Magee’s prints in the exhibition were produced at, published by and are available from Manneken Press.
About Matt Magee:
Matt Magee is an American contemporary artist known for his minimal abstract geometric paintings, sculptures, prints, assemblages, murals and photographs. He was born in Paris, France in
1961, later moving to the United States. In 1984 Magee moved to Brooklyn, NY where he main-
tained a studio until 2012. Magee currently lives and works in Phoenix, AZ.
Over a career spanning more than four decades, Matt Magee has experimented widely with abstract and conceptual art practices. Drawing inspiration from the 1960s minimalist movement, Magee combines his fascination with language and his command of design sensibilities in carefully arranged compositions and sculptural installations. Magee’s compositions are organizations of shapes that have been informed by personal history, numerology, and language. Within these conceptual spreadsheets, abacuses and hieroglyphics are reminders of the artist’s hand. His visual language relates to early hard-edge abstraction and finds inspiration in contemporary scientific, ecological and technological ideas.
Magee earned an MFA from Pratt Institute and a BA in Art History from Trinity University. Magee was awarded resident fellowships in 2007 and 2015 at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a New York State Foundation for the Arts Grant in 2002 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1991. His work has been exhibited worldwide including at the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Phoenix Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale; Dallas Center for Contemporary Art; Contemporary Museum, Baltimore; and the Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, among many others. Matt Magee is the subject of a monograph published by Radius Books in 2018.
Image: Matt Magee
