Opening | Matt Saunders - Story of a Love Affair

Name: Opening | Matt Saunders - Story of a Love Affair
Start: 2025-01-24T16:00:00+01:00
End: 2025-01-24T19:00:00+01:00
Location: Bredgade 23, 1260 Copenhagen, Denmark

Schedule

Fri Jan 24 2025 at 04:00 pm to 07:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Bredgade 23, 1260 Copenhagen, Denmark | Copenhagen , SK

Opening
Friday, January 24
at 16:00-19:00
Martin Asbæk Gallery is proud to present Matt Saunders’ solo exhibition Story of a Love Affair. The exhibition, which features both photo-based works and video installations, presents itself as a knot of associations. The exhibition borrows its title from the 1950 Italian drama by Michelangelo Antonioni, and cinema plays a prominent role throughout the show.
His recent series The Distances is based on film stills and people, who he was drawn to in his early 20s as he reflected on his own identity and self-expression. These characters represent moments of performance, and by drawing on wells of imagery within himself, repainting the people who he has painted so many times before, Saunders more broadly reflects on the passing of time and on how our understanding of the same image can change as we age.
Relationships, whether they be romantic or fixated on characters, shape us as individuals, but we are also part of shaping them. The way we perceive our heroes may be confined by what we want or need them to be at a certain time, and for that reason, changeable over time.
Saunders’ work represents this re-encountering, and his innovative transformation from one medium to another, which is at the core of his practice, is part of staging a space between the artist and his motif. In his video work, we see a complete love affair play out, though partially concealed by its abstract form. This veil between us and what is happening explores not only the fleetingness of image-based media, but also their associative affect.
Matt Saunders (b. 1975, Washington, US) studied at Harvard and Yale University, where he trained as a painter. Today, Matt Saunders is Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Saunders was a recipient of the 2022 American Academy of Arts and Letters Arts Purchase Prize, the 2015 Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the 2013 Prix Jean-François Prat, and the 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. He has exhibited internationally, and his work is in the collections of major institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; and Mudam Luxembourg Modern Art Museum, among others.