MY MAGAZINE VOL 7

MATT
SAUNDERS
Born 1975, Tacoma, WA, USA
Lives and works in Berlin,
New York and Boston
Public Collections
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Tate Modern, London
Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Guggenheim Museum, New York
UCLA Hammer Museum, California
Yale University Art Gallery
Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Deutsche Bank Collection
Matt Saunders studied at Harvard, Cambridge and
at Yale University, where he was trained as a painter.
He has been the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany
Foundation award (2009) and the Prix Jean- François
Prat award (2013). Matt Saunders has exhibited his
work internationally at such institutions as the Tate
Liverpool (2012) and the Renaissance Society, Chicago
(2010). His work has been shown in group exhibitions
at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2011), the Deutsche
Guggenheim, Berlin (2008), the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, San Francisco (2008), and P.S. 1 MoMA,
Long Island City (2001).
Saunders works are a painting/photography hybrid
whose final form is a photographic print. At their
most basic, his works begin with small ink on mylar
sketches derived from film and television stills. These
mylar sketches are then used as negatives, either contact
printed (laid directly on top of photo paper and then
developed), or placed in an enlarger. As negatives,
the mylar sketches are done in reverse-those parts
which appear lighter in the photograph are darker on
the painted negative and vice versa.
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