AMSTERDAM.- Grimm announces the presentation of a group of new bronze sculptures by Matthew Day Jackson (US, 1974). This exhibition marks the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery in Amsterdam.

ARTIST STATEMENT
“On August 1, 2016, the Texas State Department of Education voted to allow concealed firearms on the very campus that exactly 50 years prior experienced the first “popular” school shooting. On August 1, 1966 Charles Whitman killed 17 people including an unborn child and injuring 31 at the University of Texas in the infamous “Clock Tower Shootings”.

At the very core of American Identity is the subject of value founded in the idea of property ownership and the ability to defend oneself and said property. The single-family home and the firearm are two great metrics to determine the value of the individual in American culture. It might also be noted that violence is a language, and one in that is deeply imbedded in western culture, in its technology, in its diplomacy, in its civil law, in its institutions, in its history.

Watching my father and mother work very hard to keep up with one of these ideas (they never owned guns) shaped how I see what I do now. I think of my value still within the scale of my working/middle class upbringing. I use many of the materials that made up my home, or rather the illusion of a home. I say this is in that our house was carpeted, and the kitchen floor was vinyl, and the countertops were Formica covering a substrate of plywood. Many suburban homes are projections of homes they aspire to be mirroring the aspirations of their owners.

Plywood is structural and functions as a facial layer and is the surface upon which our reality is affixed. It supports our ideas of ourselves, and in the case of these sculptures it is a framing device lying at the intersection of ownership and violence, two primary lenses through which America sees the world and itself.

Bronze is the material of the memorial, or the statue. I think of these as American Statues, memorials to hopefully being understood in the future as the way we were.

I want the sculptures to exist inside or outside. They are intended to lean or hang on a wall.” - Matthew Day Jackson, 2017

Matthew Day Jackson (1974) was born in Panorama City (CA) and currently lives and works in Brooklyn (NY). He received his BFA at the University of Washington, Seattle (WA) in 1997, and his MFA at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (NJ) in 2001.

Jackson’s recent solo exhibitions include ‘Core and Strip’ at GRIMM, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2015); ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ at Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta (GA) (2015); ‘Family’ at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Switzerland (2014); ‘Something Ancient, Something New, Something Stolen, Something Blue’ at Hauser & Wirth, New York (2013); ‘Total Accomplishment’ at ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe, Germany (2013); ‘In Search of..’ at GEM, Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hague, The Netherlands (2012); MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy (2011); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2011); ‘The Immeasurable Distance’ at MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge (MA) (2009) and at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (TX) (2009). His work was further included in the group shows ‘‘TAHOE: Art of the Lake Tahoe Region’ at the Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland (CA) (2016); ‘A Bird’s-eye View of the World’ at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan (2015); ‘Skeleton’ at Museum Beelden aan Zee, Scheveningen, the Netherlands (2015); ‘What Models can do’ at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany (2014); ‘Trieste’ at GRIMM, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2014); Marianne Boesky, New York (2013) and ‘The Anatomy Lesson’ at the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, The Netherlands (2013) and many others.