68 - Matthew Dean - Exhibition Preview at Studio 53

May 9, 2025

matthewdeanartist.co.uk

Enjoyed a lovely evening at Matt's exhibition today: a quick cycle ride down into town, a turn along a terraced street, through a garage door and into the courtyard of Studio 53.

The white out-building is a studio above a gallery / workspace. Three years ago Matt held figure drawing sessions once a week in the downstairs room. I loved them, and the experience rekindled and fired up my art drive.

Matt and Sally have recently completed an extension ^ where there used to be a shed. It's a lovely light space. I love horizontal and vertical window combinations.

Matt with his wife Sally ^

Journey

Matt is not afraid to embark on new artistic journeys. Although from what he asserted, it is all one journey with different external appearances.

I was quite surprised by the show. I had seen some smaller works come up on Facebook (see a selection below)

and I was expecting to see those, but there was much more. I don't just mean quantity I mean much more exploration. Matt has a history of experience in the commercial animation industry, and this brings spatial animation to his work. I asked him if he'd used drones in his bird's eye views and he replied no - but his imagination moves around the landscape he's physically walking through, mapping it out in different dimensions. He mentioned an integration of typography although I didn't pick up that in my viewing of the work [🤣 edit that's because he said TOPography not TYPography].

I immediately made a visual connection with Art Deco ceramics and some research led me to Clarice Cliff's work.

It's interesting that 'Art Deco' was strongly influenced by the advancements of the industrial era. And today we are in a period of great change and global upheaval that has been compared to the 1930s.

There were larger works in the show which I found risk taking and experimental, with a positive result. The work goes deeper than the surface pattern suggests and it's worth spending some time with.

Here are a couple of snapshots inside.