Z A R A- M A T T H E W S

1960
born London
1979-80
Goldsmiths College, London - Foundation
1980-83
Kingston Polytechnic, BA (Hons) Fine Art: Painting
1997
Royal College of Art, London - MA Printmaking

Collections

DLA Art Collection; The Royal College of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum; British Museum; Quod, London

Zara Matthews is a painter whose work explores notions of individuality, repetition and reproduction.
Continuing a lineage from Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter, Matthews’ individually executed, photo-realistic images give the impression of having been reproduced mechanically, rather than is the case, by hand.

A recent sequence of paintings entitled 'Stanzina', meaning 'small room' in Italian, was initiated from photographs made in a bedroom in a small hotel south of Bologna in Northern Italy.

Using a broken Polaroid camera, a mechanical shutter had to be substituted with the artist’s hand. Some of the resulting images are curiously bleached and ghost like, as if the camera had caught a presence of the room quite apart from its physical appearance, whilst some images are dark and under exposed alluding to the dark chamber
that is the camera obscura.

These instant photographic images, enlarged and then reworked in oil paint, have given rise to a group of layered and pixelated paintings and etchings. They form a portrait of this tiny interior with its mirrors, shutters, and flooding light whilst simultaneously making reference to the interplay between painting and photography.

A selection of works from this series will be on show at The East End Academy - The Painting Edition
Whitechapel Gallery from July 9th to August 31st 2009 www.whitechapelgallery.org