Crystal Ball 6 Collage

www.mattcoombs.com mcoombsstudio@gmail.com Email Me! My recent work interrogates my ongoing obsession with landscape, leisure, and superstition- oil paintings that depict the natural world as an augmented space. I abstract and expand upon representational elements, conflating reality with sensation and design. The flat surface of the canvas is perceived as a gooey membrane that can be burrowed into and built on top of. Familiar scenes such as a bonfire, a bed of seashell fragments, or boat gasoline on the surface of a lake synthesize into an uncanny detachment from an immersive environment. I am most interested in a backyard version of nature, rather than a great wilderness. Elements of my work come from spending time in Central and Western New York, the birthplace of American Spiritualism and many other spin-off religious movements in the Nineteenth Century. This region was a consistent subject for the Hudson River School painters who were uniting the ideas of landscape with divinity and capitalism. Also drawing upon life on the Gulf Coast of Florida, I incorporate imagery referencing the over-saturated light and souvenirs of nature commonplace in vacation destinations. Unable to fully extricate myself from the ghosts of these seductive traditions, I am left with an apprehensive relationship with sentimentality and spirituality. This vacuum creates a deep superstition that remains formless, individualized and connected to the act of painting itself. Matt Coombs (b. 1988) is an artist currently living and working in Philadlphia, PA. Coombs earned his MFA in Painting and Drawing from Tyler School of Art in 2016, and earned a BFA in painting from Ringling College of Art and Design 2013. In March 2020, Coombs waged his third solo exhibition “Lawn + Landscape” at Late Space in Pittsburgh, and has participated in numerous group shows across the US and internationally, including Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia; Lincoln Center in Fort Collins Colorado; Vox Populi in Philadelphia; the Woodmere Art Museum, PA; The Print Space, London; and Chashama Gallery in NY.