CHRISTOPH MATTHES

Christoph Matthes
(b. 1990 in Germany) lives and works in Düsseldorf. Born in the middle-class suburbs of southern Germany, Christoph Matthes is fascinated by the symbolic significance of everyday objects in culture and society. His work often features inanimate objects, colorful animals, and fading images inspired by a collection of photographs from the 1980s and 1990s that belonged to his grandparents. As if to breathe new life into them, Matthes transposes these subjects into a material pictorial landscape, where they are completely decontextualized and acquire new meaning as they take center stage in his colorful, large-scale, childlike compositions.

Fundamental to Matthes' work is the discovery of new pictorial techniques that are able to deepen the relationship between form and content. By employing a progressive layering process using materials such as ballpoint pen, acrylic, and oil paint, the surface of his paintings is put in dialogue with its substratum, where images emerge as shapes of colors, shadows, and silhouettes resembling scars or traces of experience. Like thought and memory, past and present merge in his pictorial process, where the initial image represents the beginning of the work, the first intention, which transforms into a larger visual narrative culminating in the predominance of the image on top, unblurred, vivid, and confrontational.
Although much of the inspiration for his subjects comes from his everyday life, his work is never intended to be entirely autobiographical. Rather, it aims to create visual stories that are capable of activating free associations in the viewer and a sense of empathy with the work and its resonance. By offering a commentary on how we perceive and remember the world around us, Matthes' works act as portals into the complexities of memory and the elusive nature of life. Like hearing a dialogue between two people from behind a wall, Matthes' work alludes to something larger, magical, and inexplicable, hinted at by the free association of symbols overlapping, fading, and reappearing on the surface of the canvas like ghostly manifestations of distan memories.

Matthes work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally: Duve, Berlin (2023); Gratin, New York (2023); Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton (2021); B10B, Düsseldorf (2020); Sinalunga, Tuscany (2019); Kunstverein, Leverkusen (2018); Castello di Gargonza, Tuscany (2018); Galerie Kiki Meier-Hahn, Düsseldorf (2016).