A Scene on the Lid of a Sleeper’s Eye

Matthew Bainbridge

June 14 - August 3, 2025

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Stellarhighway is pleased to present A Scene on the Lid of a Sleeper’s Eye, Matthew Bainbridge’s first presentation of work in New York. Centered on themes of longing and discovery, the ten small drawings in this presentation are displayed unmediated, as raw objects against the wall.

Bainbridge’s non-human characters, abstract fields, and garishly colored landscapes are highly dramatized, aiming to decenter the circumstances they explore. His surfaces themselves are heavy with direct metaphor, where the sheen of waxy colored pencil is casually disrupted by the paper texture or some gesture that calls to the artist’s hand. These tableau of manifested and embodied emotions—longing, despair, joy, terror—have the heightened sense of a stage set into which viewers have entered at the peak of the performance: a pot-bellied flower monarch intently engages a sci-fi orb at the edge of a high coastal prominence, its robes catching a soft breeze as multicolored blooms begin to gently wash around it; later we see this same sovereign having surmounted a whirlwind of flowers, a triumphant fist to its chest. In others the scene is simply set, playerless as though point-of-view: colossal vines infinitely entwine themselves into hearts across a wide landscape; a golden moon rises over a dark sea, shimmering electric green from the coastline; a dark path snakes imploringly through alien wood, begging feet. Works like Sky Dragoon and Pebble Golem are periods of gestation, pure elemental moments echoed in the celestial sky swirling through each drawing.

Otherworldly and sometimes sinister, Bainbridge’s work pokes at our sense of place and purpose, positioning deeply human states in outlandish circumstances supported by comical players. Through theater and fantasy, he grazes our linked mortality. The artist writes, “…collective longing is found within the drooping of a flower, and wistful boredom in the bending of a root; familiar, organic lifeforms, twisted into personhood…”

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Matthew Bainbridge (b. 1992, UK) graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2014. Group exhibitions include those at Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, WA; Sargent’s Daughters in New York, NY; L'Inconnue in Montreal, Canada; Patriothall in Edinburgh, Scotland; and The Old Hairdressers in Glasgow, Scotland. He has been a resident at i.o.u.a.e, and received awards from the Phoenix Bursary and the Hope Scott Trust. Bainbridge has been featured in Art Maze Magazine, Elephant Magazine and Here Magazine. The artist lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Please contact Stellarhighway for more information.