M A T T H E W - B U R R O W S


1971
born in Wirral, UK
1993 -95
Royal College of Art, London - MA Painting
1990 -93
University of Central England, BA (Hons) Fine Art, First Class
2000-2001
Artist's Residency, National Gallery, London
1999-2000
Artist in Residence, Gloucester Cathedral
1996-1997
Summers Studio Award, USA

Collections include

Royal Academy, London; Robert and Susan Summer, USA; TI Group, London; Royal College of Art, London; Gloucester City Museum and Art Gallery

"As a painter Matthew Burrows starts with language, with a narrative, and through its imagined twists and turns arrives at his idiosyncratic imagery. It is
an unusual course for a contemporary painter when the mantra of high modernism has been to avoid narrative. But for Burrows the language of myth and legend provides a landscape in which he can wander freely, a place that he can people
at will through his obsessions and desires. It is as if, to start painting, he has to open that door in the back of the cupboard, beyond the rows of winter
coats, the moth eaten furs, and step out into the landscape of his own particular Narnia.

He begins with an idea, a drawing. Something will start brewing at the back of his mind, worry him, keep on nagging. It is the impulse to begin a new
journey, one on which he feels himself to be a pilgrim and, like a pilgrim, he is uncertain what he will encounter along the way. There may be many false paths and byways but it is the journey as much as the arrival that counts. He will draw, then paint and then return to drawing ...

What Burrows offers is never linear. The layers and veils of paint both reveal and simultaneously obscure alternative interpretations both dramatic and visual. The language of the narrative melds with that of the paint in an organic fusion. Marks become coded utterances; illusionistic spaces are created, spatial arenas in which the viewer may become momentarily disoriented or lost ...

Burrows describes his paintings as “fly-papers that attract alternative ideas and meanings”. But they might also be understood as maps - the charting of the unknown geography of imagined terrains and psychological spaces; for to penetrate the veils of paint is both for the viewer and the painter, alike, a journey into the centre of the self."

Extract from catalogue text by Sue Hubbard
published for Matthew Burrows’ exhibition
Anyone Here?
at the Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham,
November 2003 - January 2004

Shadow Boxer 2003 oil on canvas 46 x 36cm