New Work

David Klein Gallery
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Sept. 9 - Oct. 21, 2017

David Klein Gallery, 1520 Washington Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan, is pleased to announce the opening of Matthew Hawtin, New Work, an exhibition of his shaped paintings on fiberglass and canvas as well as his new limited-edition silkscreens. A reception for the artist will take place on Saturday, September 9th, 6 – 8 pm.

Matthew Hawtin, in his first solo show at David Klein Gallery, Detroit, continues his exploration of line, form and color with a new body of work produced on the occasion of this exhibition. Working with cast fiberglass panels and “torqued” canvases, Hawtin’s work sits within the historical canon of minimalist abstraction. His focus on hard-edge and color field painting is evident in the sculptural nature of the work and his precise, personal palette. In addition to the painting series, Hawtin is also showing a new form for corners. Produced in fiberglass and painted by hand, the corner piece is an object that contours to the angled meeting point of a room, creating its own ambiguous curved space while referencing the curves of the paintings. This new form occupies an area of a room usually devoid of interference yet it’s through intervention that something new exists – a quiet entity cornered for consideration.

Hawtin introduced his ‘Torqued Paintings’ in 1998. Through the use of custom-built stretcher frames that ‘torque’ the painting surface he began an investigation into the basic principles of painting: line, shape, color and form. The continued evolution of the work brought about a new variant of the series in 2009. The ‘Torqued Panels’ emerged out of the desire to remove the physical structure of the paintings and to focus only on the surface. Fiberglass panels and custom mounting .brackets were chosen to achieve painted torqued surfaces in varying sizes, shapes and colors that seem to ‘float off the wall’, giving them a weightlessness and presence apart from conventional paintings.

Matthew describes his process here: “Although each series has its own technical demands, they all live in aesthetic parallel that blurs the line between artistic disciplines. There is a determination to continually push the work forward through aesthetic variations, technical refinements and experimenting with new materials. Within this forward trajectory there is an overall vision to create art that is ‘other-worldly’ and in a sense, futuristic”.

Hawtin was born in England and moved to Windsor, Canada in 1979. He has a BFA from York University in Toronto and an MA Art in Architecture from the University of East London, London, UK. His work has been shown in the United States, Canada, and in Europe.

Metrotimes Article