“While inspiration from painters and sculptors in the 1950’s and 1960’s are important to my practice, personal history and my own mark making are the primary tools that build (and break down) the various systems of meaning in these prints.”
Matt Magee
M anneken Press is pleased to announce the release of three new editions by Matt Magee, who’s abstract, hard-edged forms are drawn from art-historical precedents. Magee conceived Plugs Bugs & Drugs as an abstract poetic triptych that riffs on conceptual notions of language and iterative processes relating to stacking and sequencing.
Using templates and measuring tools and utilizing line etching and aquatint, Magee drew the images directly onto copper plates, leaving space at the margins so formal information became centralized, focused and symbolic. The forms and their titles are suggestive but non-explicative. View all of Matt Magee’s new prints here.
Single impressions of Plugs, Bugs and Drugs and the set of three prints are available. A custom made portfolio containing the three prints and a colophon will be available shortly. Contact Manneken Press for current pricing/availability or additional information.
left to right: “Plugs”, “Bugs”, “Drugs”, aquatints by Matt Magee printed in color from etched copper plates on Somerset Velvet Soft White paper in editions of 20. The plate/image size is 16″ x 12″, sheet size 21 ½” x 17. Each impression is numbered, signed and dated by the artist on the front, lower margin in pencil. The release date for the series is June 10, 2021. Published by and available from Manneken Press.
About Matt Magee
M att Magee is an American contemporary artist who is best known for his minimal abstract geometric paintings, sculptures, prints, assemblages, murals and photographs. He was born in Paris, France in 1961 and moved from there to Tripoli, Libya and then to London. In 1984 Magee moved to Brooklyn where he maintained a studio until 2012. Matt Magee currently lives and works in Phoenix.
Magee’s father, a geologist and archaeologist, took him on trips through the American Southwest where he collected small objects along the way that later informed his art practices. As a young adult he worked on a seismic truck in Laredo, TX and recorded vibrations sent into the earth to determine underlying geologic formations. Later, Magee was the chief photo archivist for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Throughout his life, he has established ways of collecting that now inform his compositions.
Over a career spanning more than four decades, Matt Magee has experimented widely with abstract and conceptual art practices. Drawing inspiration from the 1960s Minimalist movement, Magee combines his fascination with language and his command of design sensibilities in carefully arranged compositions and sculptural installations. Magee’s compositions are organizations of shapes that have been informed by personal history, numerology, and language. His sculpture and collages are made using re-purposed found and collected media while his paintings explore language symbolically with an emphasis on repetition and reiteration and nods to art historical precedents. Within these conceptual spreadsheets, abacuses and hieroglyphics are reminders of the artist’s hand. His visual language relates to early hard-edge abstraction and finds inspiration in contemporary scientific, ecological and technological ideas.
Magee has an MFA from Pratt Institute and a BA in Art History from Trinity University. Magee was awarded two resident fellowships (2007 and 2015) at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and was recipient of a New York State Foundation for the Arts Grant in 2002 and of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1991. His work has been exhibited worldwide including at the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale; Dallas Center for Contemporary Art; Contemporary Museum, Baltimore; and the Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, among many others. Matt Magee is the subject of a monograph published by Radius Books in 2018.
