Matthew Chambers

SELECTED WORKS BY Matthew Chambers

Matthew Chambers
Exacting Shorthand

2011

Oil and acrylic on canvas

Triptych, Overall size: 244 x 366 cm

Matthew Chambers
As if He Were Ashamed of the Orgy of Booze and Cards

2012

Oil on canvas

243.8 x 121.9 cm

Matthew Chambers
A Day Of Which We Say, This Is The Day

2009

Acrylic and oil on canvas

244 x 122 cm

Matthew Chambers
Not For The Purpose Of Restoring The Tower

2010

Oil and acrylic on canvas

244 x 122 cm

Matthew Chambers
As Punishment For My Imperfections, My Arbitrariness And Passiveness

2010

Oil and acrylic on canvas

244 x 122 cm

Matthew Chambers
A Utility Of Immense Details

2010

Oil and acrylic on canvas

244 x 122 cm

Matthew Chambers
Every Quality Of A Body Resolves Itself

2009

Acrylic and oil on canvas

244 x 122 cm

Matthew Chambers
Pretty Note Of Colour And Carriage

2009

Acrylic and oil on canvas

244 x 122 cm

Matthew Chambers
What The Poetry Of The Present Is To The Ballad

2009

Acrylic and oil on canvas

244 x 122 cm

ARTICLES

Matthew Chambers: Chamber’s anything-goes paintings are anything but.
November 19, 2010, by Nana Asfour, Time Out New York

It was only a year ago that Matthew Chambers, 28, had his bang-up solo show at Rental Gallery, when he showed 22 paintings arrayed cheek by jowl, each four by eight feet, all hung vertically, and all delivered with the same flippant paint handling as Martin Kippenberger’s. Anything and everything was fodder for this art: hamburgers, cats, hourglasses, Stella Artois bottles, humans and artworks originally designated for the Dumpster. These last works, which the artist called “slash” paintings, were made up of the strips of canvases deemed beyond help or hope—the perfect testament to the old adage, out of failure comes success.
Chambers’s latest show at Untitled, Rental’s new incarnation on Orchard Street, is essentially a repeat of his previous one. Here again, we get vertical four-by-eight canvases (36 in total—does Chambers ever sleep?), including some colorful and some monochrome slash paintings. The works are hung two inches apart around the gallery, extending far into the foyer.
That the artist has decided to hew so closely to his previous exhibit might seem imprudent. But any feelings of haven’t-we-seen-all-this-before quickly dissipate, as it becomes clear that there’s considerable fresh breath in this series.
In certain apparel-inspired works—a black sneaker print on white canvas, a polka-dotted jumper with a large zipper that rides up the middle of the painting—the artist further impresses with his painterly aptitude. But the show’s big revelation? Two large books at the entrance containing careful studies for the paintings. They belie the uninhibited spirit of his canvases, suggesting that, at heart, Chambers is a deeply thoughtful artist.

Read the entire article here

Source:Timeout.com

In Matthew Chambers We See Ourselves, and Cats and Beer.
October 15 2009, by Peter Macia, Fader

Someone once asked each FADER editor to paint a self-portrait and, unsurprisingly, each one of the finished works looked like the same smeary pile of acrylic crap. Okay that never happened but if it did they would. Point being, it is not easy being a painter, so when someone is willing to paint a self-portrait that looks as awesome as Matthew Chambers’ does and names it “Self Portrait With More Difficult Shirt to Paint,” we applaud it. We won’t buy it because we are poor, but someone should. And someone else should buy the other paintings in Chambers’ new show at Rental Gallery in New York, which will only be up for a few more days before Brendan Fowler aka BARR’s show which opens on October 24th. None of us have art history degrees here, but it doesn’t take years of study to know a good painting of two dogs in an ice cream cone from a bad one. We’ve spent a lot of time looking through the varied works of the exhibit, titled An Activity So Pure, and feel comfortable saying without qualification that there is not another artist alive today who can paint a bottle and glass of Stella Artois and have it make us think of anything other than getting drunk. Specifically, it makes us think about why we chose music writing instead of the glamorous life of an artist, but what can you do. An Activity So Pure runs through this Saturday.

Read the entire article here

Source:Thefader.com

Matthew Chambers
Issue 115, May 2008, by Morgan Falconer, Frieze Magazine

It was Charles Dickens’ Pip who genially greeted us at the outset of Matthew Chambers’ recent show. Captured at the moment when he arrives at his new lodgings in London, in David Lean’s 1946 film of Great Expectations (1860), Pip, played by John Mills, finds his name already on the door. Never mind that he’s an orphan boy: unknown persons have great expectations of him and, as though to demonstrate their certainty, these benefactors have ensured that his accommodation will be very comfortable. Like Pip, Chambers was, in some sense, also arriving to test himself in the big city, this being the first New York show for the 20-something artist. However, instead of emerging humble and ignorant from the Kent marshes, Chambers marauded into New York from his native Los Angeles blaring his intention to conquer with all the subtlety you would expect from an overeducated skater punk with a mean reputation back home.
In Chambers’ début show at the Angstrom Gallery in Los Angeles, which took place earlier this year, he took on the voice of a semi-fictional gang-cum-art gallery called Trudi (Chambers runs a Chinatown gallery of that name, although the gang was an invention). Mavis was the name of the leader of this outfit, and also the title of Chambers’ New York show: it was rather as though he had put his group identity aside and adopted the persona of this new individual, who has decided to go solo. The problem Mavis faces, however, is the need to find a voice. Chambers is entirely befuddled by the possibilities open to him, and all he can do is reprocess what has gone before. Thus the centrepiece of the New York show was a series of gaudy, slapdash paintings entitled ‘What Do You Do after an Exorcism, What You Deal With, and Cathy Comics’ (all works 2007). They draw on various sources: Exorcism Johnny delivered a cartoon Garbage Pail Kid in the style of Jonathan Meese, to create a flat, gravelly painting of a chubby young girl; Venusia borrows from the cover of Mark von Schlegell’s eponymous novel from 2005; and Outlaw Arnolfini/Snowflake is a ham-fisted version of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434), in which the groom, who is flipping us the bird, appears to have been possessed by the spirit of Clint Eastwood, whose face appears in a shadow.
Mavis isn’t suffering from anxiety of influence so much as from serious post-influence stress disorder, a disorder so completely unhinging that it has put him/her in mind to flee: thus we have a concluding diptych, Searching for My Baby, and My Baby’s Name a Hundred Years Ago Was Miraculous, which references, on one side, Peter Doig’s memorable island dream of a man in a canoe, 100 Hundred Years Ago (Carrera) (2001), and, on the other, Bas Jan Ader’s Farewell to Faraway Friends (1971), one of his ironic, saccharine images of loss and longing that became all the more poignant when the artist himself disappeared.
Unfortunately, much of the subtler intention behind these pictures was throttled by the sheer pile-up of reference. The accompanying graphite drawings, Some Untitled Shit, didn’t help, but they did at least point to the nature of the dilemma of influence and over-determination with which Chambers is struggling. All of them referred back to the late 1970s and early ’80s, and particularly to a period in New York when not only was contemporary art raiding popular culture with a newly relaxed ease (one image, 1983 (Brooke), revisits Richard Prince’s seminal Spiritual America, 1983), but popular music was also led by culturally literate musicians who were raiding older art to furnish their self-images (thus 1981 (Bow Wow Wow), revisits the cover of that band’s single ‘Go Wild in the Country’, which has them restaging Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1862–3). Of course, many of these source images had their own source image, which in turn had its own source image – all in an endless chain of recursion that has clearly given Mavis an almighty migraine. Add to this some more images culled from press coverage of the punk band Crass (these pair with that opening image of Pip) and See You in Court Honkeys!, which takes the form of a tower of teddy bears, an old jacket with some pin badges and a jaded pair of sneakers, and, well, you’ve got something truly youthful: wild, energetic, full of grand plans and great expectations, and a whole lot of confusion.

Read the entire article here

Source:frieze.com