LONDON.- Taymour Grahne is presenting After the Ice, NYC-based artist Matthew F Fisher’s first solo show in the UK. In this new body of work, Fisher continues to play with one's idea of what is real, questioning the intricate relationship between constructed images and their corresponding physical objects and memory. Challenging the viewer’s sense of perception, the artist creates imagery that are at once familiar and unexpected. At first glance, majestic rocks, peaceful oceans, and sea creatures surface from the artist’s canvases, but at closer inspection these instantly recognisable images unfurl into idealised shapes and colours. It is only through one’s mind that those images elicit memories of lived experiences, creating a reality suspended between the personal and the universal. Combing the modernist two-dimensional painterly approach, early 80s and 90s usage of vivid colours and pastel hues, as well as his layered brushstrokes of acrylic paint, the artist forges imagery that blurs the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, real and constructed.

Fisher’s works are imbued with a sense of stillness. His images of desolated open seascapes, deprived of any apparent movement, exist beyond a temporal dimension. Analogously After the Ice, the title of the exhibition, captured the artist’s curiosity for its ability to refer equally to the past, the present and the future. This phrase, taken from a homonymous book about prehistory, has started to refer to the time we live in now and the foreseeable future. With melting glaciers, permafrost thawing, and polar caps disappearing, we have returned to a time After the Ice. Thus, similarly to the imagery of Fisher’s work, this phrase possesses the quality to supersede any temporal connotation.

Matthew F Fisher (b. 1976, Boston, MA) recent solo exhibitions include Soft Nature, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2019), Strange Light, Over Under Room, Brooklyn, NY (2018), Into the Blue, Johansson Projects, Oakland, CA (2018) and Observable Universe, Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York, NY (2017). Group shows include Paper View at The Hole, New York, NY (2019), Perspex: American Shift, Spazio 22, Milan, Italy (2019), the two artist exhibition Night Waves, with Casey Cook, at SHRINE, New York, NY (2018) Pro Forma: Context and Meaning in Abstraction, curated by Vittorio Colaizzi, Work Release, Norfolk, VA (2017), and Crunch, The Breeder, Athens (2017). He is the recipient of residencies and awards from the Pollock Krasner Foundation (2016), Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York (2015, 2007) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (2010), among others. Fisher received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (2000) and his BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design (1998).