Matt Arbuckle
subduction and abduction
15 August - 28 September 2024
Opening 2-4pm Saturday 24 August 2024
Matt Arbuckle’s practice is a process-driven exploration of place, bridging notions of landscape with painterly languages of abstraction. While fundamentally abstract, his compositions bear a relationship to the natural world, with marks and stains evocative of bisected stone, the Earth’s strata and horizon lines.
Through an experimental practice, Arbuckle uses elements of traditional Japanese shibori dyeing techniques to create abstract compositions by wrapping, twisting, folding, and draping fabric over found surfaces and structures. Bearing direct impressions of the sites and surfaces on which they are made, the resulting paintings use depth and movement to trace and reveal abstract memories.
Arbuckle’s preoccupation with geological forms has been brought into the fore in Subduction and Abduction, where he incorporates sliced marble into some of his picture planes, creating dyed compositions that respond to the naturally formed marble veins.
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Matt Arbuckle is an Aotearoa/New Zealand-born artist living and working between Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and Naarm/Melbourne. Arbuckle has a BFA from Unitec Institute of Technology, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2009), and has held solo exhibitions at Daine Singer (Melbourne), Two Rooms (Auckland), Hastings City Art Gallery (New Zealand), Bus Projects (Melbourne), Parlour Projects (Hawks Bay, New Zealand), Paulnache Gallery (Gisborne, New Zealand), Vermont Studio Center (USA), and Baustelle Gallery (Berlin)
He has participated in group exhibitions including at ChaShama (New York), Drill Hall Gallery (Canberra), Hugo Michell Gallery (Adelaide), TCB (Melbourne), Hanging Valley (Melbourne), Caves (Melbourne), Haydens (Melbourne), The Pah Homestead, TSB Wallace Arts Trust (Auckland), Gowlangsford (Auckland), Laree Payne (Hamilton), and Salamanca Arts Centre (Hobart). Arbuckle has participated in art fairs including Aotearoa Art Fair, Sydney Contemporary, Melbourne Art Fair, and Spring1883.
Arbuckle was the recipient of the 2017 James Wallace Art Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, USA, followed by a solo exhibition there in 2018. In 2020–21 he was invited to present a solo exhibition at Hastings City Art Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2021 he undertook a residency at Driving Creek, Coromandel, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Arbuckle’s work is held in the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki; the Wallace Arts Trust Collection; Driving Creek Potteries, New Zealand, and the Arthur and Suzie Roe Collection, Melbourne. In 2022 Arbuckle was a recipient of the Melbourne Art Fair’s large-scale installation commission Beyond, supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Grants and the Melbourne Art Foundation.
“But there are not just paintings. Look closer and there are slabs of actual marble, ancient rock pressed up against something that looks like marble but isn’t, paintings born this year but evoking the poetry of geological time, the ripples, clouds and threads of mineral, heat and pressure.”
Matt Arbuckle
Subduction and abduction, 2024
acrylic on knitted polyester voile, sahara noir marble, framed in aluminium
31 x 71 cm
Photograph: Tim Gresham
Installation view
Photograph: Tim Gresham
“Arbuckle’s paintings look like slices of earth, layers of coloured time exposed wherever land has been cut or fallen away, but they are paintings, each line of strata formed by the folding of fabric soaked in pigment, left outside for less than a million years but long enough for dirt and sediment to collect in their knitted polyester grain, for a stain to take hold. ”
Matt Arbuckle, Forced Under, 2024, detail, photograph Nicholas Mahady
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Photographs by Tim Gresham
