The Sun Years: Matthew F Fisher

Manhattan-based artist Matthew F Fisher is a painter of thresholds. His canvases linger, betwixt and between transient moments. The curl of a wave, caught just before crashing, the moon rising as daylight fades, a conch shell sitting quietly on the beach amplifying a far-off history.

In Fisher’s exhibition The Sun Years at Taymour Grahne Projects, these moments coalesce into a new body of work that is both intimate and expansive, fixed in personal experience and replete with universal symbolism. Since graduating in 2000, Fisher has lived and worked in New York City (apart from a three-year spell in Los Angeles). His studio is subterranean, a corner of his apartment building’s basement. Here, standing at the wall, he paints seas, beaches, birds, shells, skies, mountain peaks and all-seeing moons. Finished canvases stack up until they leave for various exhibitions, meaning Matthew often encounters his works together only when they’re on gallery walls.

“It’s only when I walk into the show for the first time,” he reflects, “that I get to see all of the works hanging together and I fully understand what I’ve made.” This sense of revelation, of piecing together fragments into a whole, underpins The Sun Years. Fisher presents natural phenomena as crisp, flattened forms and here, we renew our acquaintance with his acclaimed stylised seascapes, the characteristic shells and clouds and horizons that have captivated him, in varying permutations and relationships, for years. And, in this new exhibition we fly through big fluffy clouds too, leaving the beaches and seascapes far below as Fisher’s brush takes us soaring into the skies.

Here, in A Share of the Sky and Montagne (Mountain) we encounter mountain peaks in Matthew’s imagery for the first time. Inspired by Marsden Hartley’s Modernist mountain paintings, Fisher renders lofty peaks as massive, monumental forms, hovering imperiously above the cloud line, simultaneously grounded and weightless.