About — Matthew Neil Gehring

Bio:

Matthew Neil Gehring is an artist working in ceramics, drawing, and painting, who maintains an active studio practice and has exhibited widely, participating in numerous group shows and eight solo exhibitions, including “Mixed Business” at Stout Projects, Brooklyn, NY and “Brilliant Corners” at the Dishman Art Museum at Lamar University in Beaumont, TX. His recent group exhibitions include, “Breathe”, at Museum St. Wendel, St. Wendel, Germany; “Brooklyn Bridge” at Bridge Productions, Seattle, WA; “Abstraction and its Discontents”, at Storefront Ten Eyck, Brooklyn, NY; “Form and Facture” at the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY; “Eight Painters” at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York, NY; and a two-person show at c2c Projects in San Francisco, CA. Matthew’s work has been featured or reviewed in publications including The New Criterion, Art Journal, Art Review, and ArtWeek.

He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Indiana on a Society for Arts and Humanities scholarship, and his MFA from the University of Delaware on a full graduate assistantship. He relocated to the Northern California coast in 2001 after completion of his degrees where he lived for two years, making and exhibiting artwork while teaching at Humboldt State University. In 2003, he accepted a faculty position in the Art Department at Syracuse University where he lived and worked for the next four years. In 2007 he accepted a faculty position in Visual Arts at Suffolk County Community College and relocated from Central New York to Brooklyn where he lived for nine years preceding his recent move to Queens. He is currently an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Suffolk County Community College where he is the Assistant Chair of Visual Arts and Director of the Flecker Gallery. Matthew lives and works between Queens, Long Island, and Central New York.

Statement:

I’m a potter and a painter, bringing desire and need together in my work. I think of this work as functional painting, an art form where all of my interests and experiences have come together. It is a synthesis across time of color, form, and purpose with the aim of creating a kind of visual poetry, through beautiful, evocative images and forms that hopefully elicit a warm hopefulness, moments of joy, and opportunities for quiet contemplation. Light, color, surface, form, and function are all equal players. Function and service have become central values in my studio work and throughout my life. Frequency, and balance guide my thinking and are a kind of mantra. My long attraction to abstraction has found a renewed support and synthesis with pottery forms, and my drawings both inspire and are inspired by this ceramic work. For me, art is all about seeing and listening; connecting with the earth and with people, and dealing in raw essential elements. In my pottery, specifically, I feel that I am making objects that connect through service and encourage generosity and community. In the drawings, I am attempting to bridge spaces between seeing and memory, representation and abstraction, and response to the elegant fluid and absorbent interactions of paper, ink, and paint. This is an evolution that is both intuitive and deliberate, following the path as it unfolds before me.