Matt Overend Visiting if ART Gallery

Watch a clip of Matt Overend sitting on the sofa at if ART Gallery, November 2009, talking about burning stuff.

Works of Art: Matt Overend

Architecture Study No. 15, 2008

Oil on canvas

18 x 32 inches

$ 1,400

All works of art by Matt Overend are available at if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln Street, Columbia, SC.

Contact Wim Roefs at if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com or (803) 255-0068/(803) 238-2351.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE WORKS OF ART BY MATT OVEREND.

Meet Matt Overend & See His Most Recent Paintings

For a PREVIEW, click here.


if ART Gallery
1223 Lincoln St., Columbia, SC
presents

Meet Matt Overend
&
See His Most Recent Paintings

Tuesday, May 19, 2009, 6 – 9 p.m.


For more information,
contact Wim Roefs at if ART:
(803) 238-2351 – wroefs@sc.rr.com

Matt Overend's Ode To John Updike

2009

Here’s to you,
Old man of letters,
Among your peers,
There are none better,
For your wit and your alacrity,
But the titmouse and the chickadee… de… d…

if ARTwalk: Salon I & II: December 11- 24, 2008

For exhibition installation images, click here.

THE SALON I & II

Dec. 11 – 24, 2008

an exhibition at two Columbia, SC, locations:

Gallery 80808/Vista Studios

808 Lady Street

&

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln Street

Reception and ifART Walk: Thursday, Dec. 11, 5 – 10 p.m.

at and between both locations

Opening Hours:

Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Saturday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Sunday, 1 – 5 p.m.

& by appointment

Open Christmas Eve until 7 p.m.

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 255-0068/ (803) 238-2351 – if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com

For its December 2008 exhibition, if ART Gallery presents The Salon I & II, an exhibition at two Columbia, SC, locations: if ART Gallery and Gallery 80808/Vista Studios. On Thursday, December 11, 2008, 5 – 10 p.m., if ART will hold opening receptions at both locations. The ifART Walk will be on Lady and Lincoln Streets, between both locations, which are around the corner from each other.

The exhibitions will present art by if ART Gallery artists, installed salon-style at both Gallery 80808 and if ART. Artists in the exhibitions include two new additions to if ART Gallery, Columbia ceramic artist Renee Rouillier and the prominent African-American collage and mixed-media artist Sam Middleton, an 81-year-old expatriate who has lived in the Netherlands since the early 1960s.

Other artists in the exhibition include Karel Appel, Aaron Baldwin, Jeri Burdick, Carl Blair, Lynn Chadwick, Steven Chapp, Stephen Chesley, Corneille, Jeff Donovan, Jacques Doucet, Phil Garrett, Herbert Gentry, Tonya Gregg, Jerry Harris, Bill Jackson, Sjaak Korsten, Peter Lenzo, Sam Middleton, Eric Miller, Dorothy Netherland, Marcelo Novo, Matt Overend, Anna Redwine, Paul Reed, Edward Rice, Silvia Rudolf, Kees Salentijn, Laura Spong, Tom Stanley, Christine Tedesco, Brown Thornton, Leo Twiggs, Bram van Velde, Katie Walker, Mike Williams, David Yaghjian, Paul Yanko and Don Zurlo.

Biography: Matt Overend

Road Studies No. 322, 2008

Oil on canvas

17 x 14 in.

$ 900

Matt Overend (b. 1950)

Matt Overend is a native of Las Vegas who grew up in Atlanta and has lived in Smoaks, S.C., since 1981. He was with Janet Orselli in an if ART exhibition in March 2005 at Vista Studios in Columbia, S.C. In the past two years, he has had solo exhibitions in Hilton Head, Camden, Charleston, all in South Carolina, and in Charlotte, N.C. Overend in 1973 graduated as an aerospace engineer at Georgia Tech before studying art at Santa Barbara City College in California, the University of California at Santa Barbara and Yale University.

Essay: Matt Overend

Two Knives # 16, 2007

Oil on canvas

18 x 16 in.

$ 1,000

MATT OVEREND

By Wim Roefs

Painting buildings is a return to the 1980s for him, Matt Overend says. “They go back to some non-representational, even hard-edge work I did then. I also did some architectural paintings, but more importantly, I used the straight edge a lot and a T-square instead of free-handing it. That came out of my training as an engineer. It seemed as natural to me as using a brush.”

The new paintings easily are recognizable as Overend’s. They have less in common with, say, the architectural paintings of South Carolina artists such as Edward Rice or David Yaghjian than with California’s Richard Diebenkorn, one of Overend’s influences. They relate directly to Overend’s road studies and studio still lifes of the past two decades. 

The palette remains distinctly Overend’s, even as the particular combination and interaction of large blocks of color sometimes gives the impression of new color schemes. Also, his canvases still have a dry look. And his compositions maintain their spatial, flat and sparse qualities, in his Facade paintings even more so than before. 

Empty Lot is the architectural cousin of some of Overend’s familiar road studies. The lonely lamppost echoes the solitary tree, and the parking lot, the open rural spaces of some of his road studies. The lines marking parking spaces steer the viewer’s eye, not unlike the edge-of-road or center-of-the-road lines do.

But Empty Lot is about Overend’s quest to explore the vibration between non-representation and the pictorial, the particular. The lamppost, its shadow and the imaginary line between their ends form the abstract element, the triangle, while the lamps are anecdotal. “I am trying to see how far I can push the non-representational,” Overend says. “Sometimes I think I don’t push it enough.”

“The lines of the parking spaces in Empty Lot are what Canadian composer Glenn Gould would call ‘extra little things of interest.’ You always wonder, are they just good for business or are they actually necessary for the image you are trying to make? You constantly have to make decisions about whether a mark is valid as a mark or just pictorially.”

Black Barn is about the relationship between the asymmetrical barn and the cast-shadow triangle. “I’ve been trying to paint that barn for 15 years,” Overend says. “I took numerous pictures of it in all kinds of light, figuring out how the shadow works.”

In his Facade paintings, Overend takes the interaction between abstraction and representation to a new level. Triangles, rectangles and upside-down Ls double as walls, doors and shadows. Through asymmetrical compositions featuring high walls moving from the edge of the canvas toward the center, Overend upped the ante in his exploration of spatial depth and flatness. The compositions can be read inside out, with the wall in the back “moving” to the front. “All that seems as real to me as anything,” Overend says, “as real as what I see when I walk outside.”