Matt Saunders, 1975

Born in Tacoma, Washington, Matt Saunders received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College in 1997. In 2000, he completed his MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale University School of Art. Two years later Saunders moved to Berlin, where he continues to work today.

Saunders produces works in diverse disciplines, including drawing, painting, photography and video. He often attempts to disrupt the traditional perception of painting by combining digital and analogue techniques on transparent sheets of Mylar or on canvas. Drawing on his early introduction to the performative films and engravings of artists such as Andy Warhol, he concentrates on how personality can be expressed in moving and still images, and is more interested in images retained in memory than in popular mass culture. Saunders has developed a new technique using ink and transparent sheets of Mylar that is based on Polaroids of 20th century avant-garde film scenes, forgotten movie stars and the television screen. In his 2014 photographic work “Tree (Kuhle Wampe) (Curtain), version 2”, he plays with the tree scene taken from Berthold Brecht’s 1932 communist-themed film “Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt?” (Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World?). He first takes a photograph of the film frame and produces a negative in digital format. He then draws the image obtained with ink wash on transparent sheets of Mylar. Lastly, he prints the negatives he has drawn as large black-and-white photographs, thus creating a new interdisciplinary artistic language out of his personal quest.