Works on paper questioning our preconceptions of art and history and their protagonists
As much paintings as drawings – the surfaces can be surprisingly impactful; and modern art tells us art can be anything, so a drawing can be a painting -- these works on paper question our preconceptions of art and history and their protagonists, placing the latter in unexpected and sometime humorous situations. The works address our understanding of cultural transmission and the influence of images and text across time and space. Cultural memory and the impurities that memory acquires, become material like paints and colours. Psychology, dreams, the soul, become the same as knowing the isms of art. A recurring cast of about twenty sacred cows from Philip Guston to Hilma af Klint, plays out scenes in which anyone might appear. British royals, the IDF, Jesus, authors, poets, the Beatles, Nico, Nietzsche. This world of history is factual and public and well known, and it is our psychic mothers and fathers, and the manufacturer in the form of art of a fulfilled version of our dreams and desires. Matthew’s own real mother often makes an appearance. They both went to mental hospital when he was six for observation for psychosis. She was mad as a hatter and had ECT, and he was sent to a children’s home for seven years. Then he was kidnapped to Canada when he was fourteen and brought back by Scotland Yard after a worldwide police search involving Interpol and the FBI. Philosophical wonderment at the workings of the mind, and art-critical sly appreciation of the whole span of art forever from the year dot to neoliberal art fairs, with a certain amount of blasé, frivolous laughter, became Matthew’s destiny as an adult. Now, entering his seventies, he’s an artist with a beard selling thousands of drawings a year on Instagram. Such is life -- as Ned Kelly is reported to have said, who Matthew has drawn many times being painted by Sidney Nolan – on the scaffold before he was hanged.
The humour is sweet, harsh, broad, eery. One of his early drawings — he began the series in 2020 — shows the frozen grimace of Jack, in the Overlook Hotel, in the maze in the morning, with Hilma af Klint arriving too late with alternative occultism. He says every scene even where the factual record is respected, and surrealistic distortion minimised, “is an incitement to wake up.” The whole body of work is a statement against art as product, and the artworld and art history being assimilated by dominant interests. When a subject finally “tips out” he knows what it is. “Where everything should always have gone, what the title is, what things should look like, what the faces should always have expressed, what the interactions are. Whichever it is, a crowd or an individual, the scene has a meaning that isn’t the overwhelming selling meaning we all live in subservience to.” But this tipping comes from a process of working in the dark. If the drawings are paintings the historic parallel is Abstract Expressionism. Significance pops up from gestural chaos.
Matthew Collings was born in London in 1955. He studied painting at the Byam Shaw school of art in the 1970s and did the Goldsmiths MA Fine Art Course in the early 1990s. He has written many books including Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damian Hirst and has written and presented popular TV series like the BAFTA winning This Is Modern Art on Channel 4. As the editor of Artscribe, in the 1980s, Collings was commended by the Turner Prize for transforming this UK based art magazine into an international publication. With his partner Emma Biggs he collaborates on abstract paintings based on colour relationships, which are in collections around the world. Currently, Matthew is working on an illustrated book titled Alternative Art History: What’s happening, why do we have souls, what’s art for?
