Matias Faldbakken

Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present new works by Matias Faldbakken in his second solo show with the gallery. Faldbakken employs vandalism and a destructive attitude towards pop culture in his visual practice, circling around the idea of artistic production as a ‘negative progression’. This might at first appear to be a cynical approach towards art production, but is rather his exploration of the oxymoron at the heart of the idea ‘if art is the opposite of work, why work?’ Often using language as a starting point to make his images, obscuring, suppressing and destroying letters, phrases and sentences in order to create visual abstractions, Faldbakken’s interest lies in abstraction as a technique for rejection, rather than as an aesthetic exercise. Developed from his earlier works using tape on canvas or directly on to walls, and from his interest in the Reinhardtian monochrome’s preoccupation with being a sign that...