LOS ANGELES, CA.- the Landing presents At Dawn by Matt Phillips, the gallery's second solo exhibition with the artist. Featuring a set of new paintings made over the course of the past winter and into early spring, the exhibition marks a period of focused experimentation within a structured set of visual constraints. The resulting works are layered, tactile, and quietly rhythmic – compositions built from repeated shapes and shifting color relationships. At Dawn is on view from May 17th through June 28th.
Each painting in At Dawn is composed from a familiar set of abstract forms: flat, clearly defined shapes arranged in varying combinations against largely monochromatic grounds. “I find this lexicon so archaic that it is practically irrelevant to our complex times,” writes Phillips, “and yet, this elemental vocabulary has a surprising capacity to grow and compound upon itself.” This limited vocabulary – arches, triangles, rounded blocks – appears across the exhibition, recombined in ways that test their visual and emotional range. Some compositions feel spacious, with generous expanses of color and light; others are more compact, where shapes press against one another to create a sense of pressure or internal movement.
Phillips often begins with a drawing, then allows each painting to develop through revision. Layers of translucent pigment are built up slowly, revealing earlier marks and structural shifts beneath the surface. This approach compresses time, allowing for the full span of his process to register on the surface at once. It also gives the paintings a kind of loosened geometry: each form is precise but softened by the hand that made it.
Matt Phillips, Untitled. 66 x 54.
Though the work is resolutely abstract, its mood is shaped by observation and experience. The paintings do not describe the natural world directly, but they absorb its rhythms: the layering of light at different times of day, the tempo of weather, the gradual unfolding of growth or decay. These overlapping sensations inform the pace and structure of each composition. Color is central here, not just as a design tool but as a carrier of temperature, mood, and spatial tension.
By working within self-imposed constraints, Phillips opens space for variation and surprise. Each painting builds on the last, not through linear progression but through a kind of lateral movement – testing balance, dissonance, and visual weight. Repetition becomes a method of exploration rather than resolution.
At Dawn reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in how abstract painting can register time and touch without relying on narrative or reference. These works carry an accumulated presence: like a dawn landscape, they ask to be looked at slowly, and more than once.
Matt Phillips is a painter living in Brooklyn, NY. He has had solo exhibitions at Louis Buhl & Co, Detroit, MI; Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, NY; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL; the Landing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA; Direktorenhaus Museum, Berlin, Germany; Studio d’Arte Raffaelli, Trento, Italy; Devening Projects, Chicago, IL; Zillman Art Museum, Bangor Maine; and Steven Harvey, New York, NY. He has participated in group exhibitions at The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; Harper’s, New York, NY; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Hollis Taggart, New York, NY; and Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY. Phillips has been an artist-in-residence at The Fores Project, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. He is represented by Mindy Solomon Gallery and the Landing Gallery.
