Matthew Day Jackson Born 1974, Panorama City, CA (US)
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY (US)

Matthew Day Jackson’s diverse practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video, performance, furniture design, and installation art. The concept of connectivity is at the core of Jackson’s work. He investigates a wide range of philosophical, scientific, and historical themes that he interweaves with his personal narrative.

Jackson's practice employs intensive research and production processes to create objects that coincide with a reassembling of history. Lead, Formica, epoxy and bronze, as well as geodesic structures and found objects are used in works that are equally intricate and monumental.  

Jackson views the combination of materials and references to disparate time periods as a metaphor for interconnectivity. His use of materials reflects the idea that our evolution is not only found within the slow adaptation of our bodies, but it is, “also present in the materials we use to express our humanity over time, the evolving process of the creation of society, and the performance of culture.” Those who have shaped the cultural, social and political landscape in the United States, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Buckminster Fuller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and others, have been influential in the iconogaphic and conceptual basis for Jackson’s work. Accordingly, events that influenced the mythology of American exceptionalism—the Apollo 11 moon landing, development of the American West, and the dropping of the atomic bomb—are rendered to imagine alternate outcomes and suggest the inherent falsehoods contained within such a mythology. 

Through referencing the cannon of art history, many of Jackson's works also examine the projection of human desires onto nature. For example in Archimboldo, Still Life with Flowers and Reclining Nude series Jackson investigates how artists have propagated mythologies of beauty throughout history. The still lifes — drawn from paintings made in the 17^th century by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Younger, and Archimboldo portraits, are remade almost entirely from artificial materials such as Formica— whereas the reclining nudes or odalisque works are made from scorched and dismantled found tree trunks. For Jackson, the measurable and the inexplicable, power and sacrifice, mortality and the infinite are all part of a realm he has dubbed ‘the Horriful’, where everything we do has the potential to create both horror and beauty.

Matthew Day Jackson (b. 1974 in Panorama City, CA, US) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY (US). He received his BFA at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA (US), and his MFA at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (US). He has also studied at NHRA Supercomp Dragster License, Frank Hawleys Racing School in Gainesville, FL (US) and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME (US). Jackson’s work is included in many private and public collections such as the Astrup-Fearnley Museum, Oslo (NO); Whitney Museum for American Art, New York, NY (US); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL); François Pinault Collection, Paris (FR); Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (IT); Zabludowicz Collection, London (UK); Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX (US); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL) and High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (US); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (NL) and Qiao Zhibing Collection, Shanghai (CN).
Jackson’s recent solo exhibitions include: Waterfalls and Birds, Guesthouse, Wilson, WY (US); Matthew Day Jackson Flowers, Windows and Thistles, Hauser & Wirth, Zurich (CH); Audubon in the Anthropocene: Works by Matthew Day Jackson, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS (US); Maa, Gösta Serlachius Museum, Mänttä (FI); Pareidolia, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); Van Gogh Inspires Matthew Day Jackson, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (NL); Pathetic Fallacy, Hauser & Wirth, Somerset (UK); New Landscape, Qiao Space, Shanghai (CN); Still Life and the Reclining Nude, Hauser & Wirth, London (UK); Gunshot Plywood Bronze Works, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); Core and Strip, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); There Will Come Soft Rains, Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta, GA (US). Additional solo exhibitions have been held at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich (CH) and New York, NY (US); ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe (DE); GEM, Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hague (NL); MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (IT); Kunstmuseum, Lucerne (CH); MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, MA (US) and at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX (US).