/ WORK AVAILABLE BY
Matthew Bainbridge
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Matthew Bainbridge graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2014. works to provoke the superficiality of the surface via highly saturated colored pencil drawings depicting imagined worlds. His worlds hold quasi-personal narratives played out through a protagonist, whereas at other times a landscape is left on its own as a place for meditative contemplation, or is filled with kinetic potential. Bainbridge’s non-human characters and garishly colored landscapes are highly dramatized, aiming to decenter the thoughts, relationships and circumstances they explore. His surfaces themselves are heavy with direct metaphor: the sheen of the waxy colored pencil gently disrupted by the texture of the paper or some gesture that calls to the artist’s hand. These tableau of deeply embodied, manifest emotions—longing, despair, joy, terror—have the heightened senses of a stage set: a pot-bellied flower monarch languishes in the dry, broken ground of its realm only to revel in an eventual rebirth, robes flowing proudly in an imaginary wind behind it; a cavern of folded rocks and layered boulders wraps around a blue sky holding a pink moon, capturing a thin stream within a pool, all to become the pained, crying eye of a dragon. “Cartoonish landscapes are as deep as they are dumb,” the artist writes, “overly-saturated, and impossibly plastic.” Recent 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. 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 also been featured in Art Maze Magazine, Elephant Magazine and Here Magazine.
︎ Inquire
Matthew Bainbridge graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2014. works to provoke the superficiality of the surface via highly saturated colored pencil drawings depicting imagined worlds. His worlds hold quasi-personal narratives played out through a protagonist, whereas at other times a landscape is left on its own as a place for meditative contemplation, or is filled with kinetic potential. Bainbridge’s non-human characters and garishly colored landscapes are highly dramatized, aiming to decenter the thoughts, relationships and circumstances they explore. His surfaces themselves are heavy with direct metaphor: the sheen of the waxy colored pencil gently disrupted by the texture of the paper or some gesture that calls to the artist’s hand. These tableau of deeply embodied, manifest emotions—longing, despair, joy, terror—have the heightened senses of a stage set: a pot-bellied flower monarch languishes in the dry, broken ground of its realm only to revel in an eventual rebirth, robes flowing proudly in an imaginary wind behind it; a cavern of folded rocks and layered boulders wraps around a blue sky holding a pink moon, capturing a thin stream within a pool, all to become the pained, crying eye of a dragon. “Cartoonish landscapes are as deep as they are dumb,” the artist writes, “overly-saturated, and impossibly plastic.” Recent 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. 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 also been featured in Art Maze Magazine, Elephant Magazine and Here Magazine.