Matthias Franz

GRIMM is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Matthias Franz at the London gallery, opening this Summer. The opening will coincide with London Gallery Weekend (June 6 - 8, 2025). 

For Franz, painting is a necessarily slow and thoughtful process. Inspired variously by literature, cinema and critical theory, the artist uses paint to visualise an interior notion or question, first realising the composition on smaller canvases, testing different perspectives and palettes, before tackling the subject at a large scale. Building up his images over several weeks through layered oil paint, each scene has a palpable weight, lending the textured environments a charged, psychological atmosphere.

Franz is careful to distance the viewer’s perspective from the interior of his paintings. He describes this process as “clinging to the inherent depth and secret of things.” Buried within his images the viewer searches for the face of a figure or the contours of the skyline. Amongst the seemingly unconnected locations pictured throughout his oeuvre he depicts the environment of the academy, onstage performances, and beds full of dreaming bodies. Throughout these scenes, the motif of collective longing is projected into a broader social context, as are suggestions of detachment, inaction, and rebelliousness. 

The artist’s early influences include American painters such as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, while he embraces the expressive grandeur inherited from his continental European predecessors and contemporaries, German painters such as Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, and Daniel Richter. 

About the Artist

Matthias Franz (b. 1984, Ilmenau, DE) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2019, where he was a student of Daniel Richter. The artist’s first solo exhibition with GRIMM, Salon des Nutzlosen, took place at the gallery’s New York location in June of 2022, and his second solo exhibition with GRIMM, Birds Sing the Echoes of Fragmentation, took place in March 2023 in Amsterdam (NL).

Franz's work can be found in the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Palm Beach, FL (US); The David and Indre Roberts Collection, London (UK); De Heus-Zomer Collection, Barneveld (NL); THE EKARD COLLECTION; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas TX (US); He Art Museum, Foshan (CN); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX (US), and numerous private collections.