Downtown, Los Angeles
Matthew Kirk
In a Time of Darkness, This is Wonderful News
De BoerDe Boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of mixed-media wall works and sculpture by Matthew Kirk in Los Angeles. In Kirk’s first solo exhibition with De Boer, the New York-based artist presents large and medium-scale works evoking art historical antecedents from Henri Matisse, Christopher Wool, and Joe Fedderson as well as traditional pictography, abstraction, and the cultural memory of his upbringing. The exhibition’s title, In a Time of Darkness, This Is Wonderful News, captures the spiritual optimism embedded in Kirk’s process that leads with joy, clarity, and connection. Honoring both a contemporary aesthetic and the cultural imagery of his childhood, having been born in Arizona, and relocating to the Wisconsin shores of Lake Michigan, Kirk balances vivid formalism with personal symbolism. Recurring silhouettes of feathers, trees, moons, and limbs appear and reappear across the panels, embedded in shifting environments of sky blues, flat blacks, and fluorescent pinks. The surfaces evoke graffiti, pattern languages, and craft traditions that dwell in the space between recognition and mystery, between mark and meaning. Kirk channels a history of image making grounded in landscape, spirit, and signal, updating it through urban materials, vibrant color, and compositional fragmentation. In a Time of Darkness, This Is Wonderful News, Kirk scales up these dialogues, and his arrangements become compositions that hum with rhythm and coded energy. They feel simultaneously ancient and now, analog and digital, sacred and irreverent. The title becomes more than poetic, it suggests the function of the work itself, a flare of identity and meaning, sent up amidst the static and urgency of contemporary life. Matthew Kirk (b. 1978) was born in Ganado, AZ, and grew up in Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Michigan. Kirk, who is of Diné (Navajo) and European descent, is a New York-based artist known for his mixed-media work inspired by Diné motifs found in textiles as well as his urban environment. His three-dimensional constructions are replete with distinctive motifs configured on what the artist calls tiles. Kirk employs his own pictorial language of elemental signs—arrows suggesting moving and force, concentric circles and squares, and celestial, human, and animal forms—to explore the intersection of his Indigenous and Euro-American heritage and position himself in respect to both. Kirk has had solo exhibitions at De Boer, Los Angeles, CA; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY; Fierman, New York, NY; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Makasini Contemporary, Turku, Finland; and Louis B. James Gallery, New York, NY. Group exhibitions include those at Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York; Sundaram Tagore, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York, New Paltz; Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN; De Boer, Antwerp, BE; and Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY. His work is included in the public collections of the Eiteijorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN; Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; The Forge Collection, Taghanic, NY; Meta, New York, NY; TD Bank Collection, Toronto, Canada; and Bank of America Collection, New York, NY. His works have been published in The New York Times, ARTnews, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2019, Kirk was the recipient of the Eiteljorg Museum Fellowship for Contemporary Native American Art.