MATT MAGEE

Matt Magee is an American contemporary artist who is best known for his minimal abstract geometric paintings, sculptures, prints, assemblages, murals and photographs. 

He was born in Paris, France in 1961 and from there moved to Tripoli, Libya and then to London. He moved to Brooklyn in 1984 to attend Pratt Institute for an MFA. Matt maintained a studio in NYC until 2012 settling in Phoenix, Arizona.

Magee went with his geologist father (up until his death in 2008) on field trips from their home base in Texas to visit Native American rock art sites throughout the American West and saw hundreds if not thousands of pictographs and petroglyphs. In his twenties, he saw that this flat glyphic information sharing related to images he was seeing in art history courses, and the idea that meaning could be imparted through simple formal gesture and mark making was an early lesson.

Over a career spanning more than four decades, Magee has experimented widely with abstract and conceptual art practices. Magee’s compositions are organizations of shapes that have been informed by personal history, numerology, and  language.
Re-purposing a variety of found and collected media characterizes his sculpture and collage while his paintings explore language symbolically with an emphasis on repetition and reiteration and nods to art historical precedents.

Magee’s painting style is minimal in concept, but his brushstrokes are expressive. Within these conceptual spreadsheets, abacuses and hieroglyphics are reminders of the artist’s hand. His visual language relates to early hard-edge abstraction and finds inspiration in contemporary scientific, ecological, and technological ideas.

In the last decade, Magee’s assimilation of language and structure has resulted in conceptually- sharp and graphically-sophisticated print making and mural projects. rose of jays (2011), is a classic example of concrete poetry through its visual verbal pun of the writing grid and the double meaning of the spoken vs. the written word. His ongoing series of “graphemes” alludes to the smallest unit in a writing system wherein written word is replaced with spatial units of color thereby merging conceptualism with the history of monochromatic painting.

The artists Agnes Martin and Richard Artschwager are important contemporary touchstones for Magee and provide a rich foundation for expanding on well-established idioms while creating trans-generational conversations in the process.
Recently, the austerity of these grid structures have given way to more spontaneous and humorous structures; sometimes turning up as assemblages resembling computer tablets but made out of rounded edge plywood panels and plastic elements. While his contemporary glyph/mural Wall. Text. (2018), references the current state of communication and the disintegration of traditional social connective tissues through a string of illegible typographic characters arranged into seeming coherence and legibility.
Matt Magee resides and works in Phoenix Arizona.