Matt McClune was born in 1973 in Worcester, MA, USA. He lives and works in St. Romain, France.
For the past 15 years Matt McClune has been taking visual clues from the environments of particular locations he was visiting in Europe and abroad and distilling them into his often quiet, meditative paintings, flooded with light. At times bordering on the monochrome, more often active and gestural, the many-layered washes of clear polyurethane gel, containing pure, finely-dispersed pigments, are applied to various metallic supports with specially-made spatulas of varying widths. Ideally seen in changing natural light, McClune’s paintings often shift in mood and color, as the light of day penetrates into the layers.
McClune’s early paintings were abstract aerial landscapes, as seen from an airplane window, with vague but profound depth and space. Moving to the French countryside of Burgundy in 2004, surrounded by people interested in the idea of “terroir” brought about paintings that were both “of a specific place, at a specific time” as well as paradoxically non-representational. This, combined with his compositional structures, creates work that is both intellectually rigorous and immaterially transcendental.
pdf exhibition brochure "Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue. A Homage to Barnett Newman“ - 2024
pdf exhibition brochure "Layer by Layer exploring the Essence of Color" - Matt McClune - 2023
pdf exhibition catalog "Black is Beautiful", 2021
pdf exhibition brochure "wie weiss ist wissen die weisen" - 2019
pdf exhibition brochure "sensualminimalphysical" - 2017
pdf exhibition catalog "Fifty Shades of Red" - 2016
pdf exhibition brochure "Mostly Monochrome" - 2015
pdf exhibition brochure "WORKS ON & WITH PAPER" - 2015
pdf exhibition brochure "Transparenz der Farbe" - 2013