Blum & Poe is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Mathew Cerletty. This will be Cerletty's first solo presentation in Los Angeles.

Artist Statement:

About a year ago, I started worrying that my work wasn't embarrassing enough anymore. I was thinking of it in relation to the overtly personal portraits of friends, family, and myself that I made in my early 20s. Shortly after moving to New York, I deviated from that stuff; it began feeling predictable and emo, and didn't reflect my excitement about all the different art I was seeing. I started taking my paintings apart, focusing on one or two ingredients. Titles, often the initial inspiration for a figurative work, became painted text. Wallpaper that surrounded a figure became patterned abstraction. I wanted to implicate viewers, so I tried to make artwork that sat right on the line with evasive intentions. A worthwhile goal, but in retrospect I think I was also trying to disguise my own vulnerability.

This show is more openly about my life. One way to understand the work is to know that my girlfriend moved in with me last summer. Another is to see the different kinds of pictures I've made over the past 10 years as reconfigurations of the same thing. I now more fully understand why people say every artist really just makes the same painting over and over their whole life. Maybe that's not a problem.

About the artist:

Mathew Cerletty was born in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin in 1980. He received his BFA from Boston University in 2002. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY; Royal Academy of Arts, London; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; Museum Voor Moderne Kunst, Oostende, Belgium; and New Jersey Museum of Contemporary Art, Wickatunk, NJ. 

Image: © Mathew Cerletty, Blum & Poe