Biography

Matt Saunders is an artist whose work moves between painting, photography, printmaking, and multi-screen installations with animated film.  He has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, Tank (Shanghai), St. Louis Art Museum and the Renaissance Society (Chicago) as well as gallery exhibitions with Marian Goodman Gallery (New York, London and Paris), Blum & Poe (Tokyo and Los Angeles) and others.  His work is found in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, and SF MoMA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has been featured in group exhibitions at those institutions, along with others like MassMOCA, the Sharjah Biennial and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Saunders was the recipient of the 2015 Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and the 2013 Prix Jean-François Prat. He splits his time between New York, Berlin and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is Professor of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University and the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Director of Arts at Radcliffe.

Project Summary

Florentine Mannerism has long hung in the background of Matt Saunders' work, from his very first solo exhibition, referencing Bronzino and Warhol, to his most recent explorations of affect and style in, for instance, the films of Werner Schroeter.  He is interested in the legacies of maniera in film and conceptual work of the 20th and 21st Centuries, and his own practice explores the way that subjects, gestures and images move across mediums, using photography, painting and drawing in innovative ways to confront each other and to slip images into inter-medial dialogue. 

For his time at i Tatti, Saunders is thinking about sinopia—the later-reveal of the earlier drawings of frescos—and the reversal of time, what we experience as multiplication and circulation. 

Mannerism as moving image.  Also the moving—emotional and immersive—qualities of manner.   Practically, he'll be working in situ, in a variety of media, letting one path lead to another.