Harper’s is pleased to present Milking The Rat, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist Matt Nichols. The exhibition opens on Wednesday, March 2, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Milking The Rat represents Nichols’s return to the immediacy of painting. Reemerging from a multidisciplinary practice that emphasizes process and material as much as the final product, Nichols’s paintings externalize deeply personal investigations in contrast with collective memories and art historical context. Starting from his impulse to paint flowers, Nichols heavily works his surfaces to challenge the importance of each mark in his impasto paintings. Tufts, dollops, and globs of paint swirl together and congeal over recognizable forms, shifting Nichols’s subjects from observed still life to object, and reintroducing them to the viewer through his scrutinizing lens. Untitled (potted flowers) depicts what might be the early stage of one of Nichols’s obliterated paintings; the exposed canvas further emphasizes the build-up of paint and nuanced gestures throughout the exhibition. Similarly, Funeral Pyre Eyes draws attention to the history of each individual piece with graphic lines and white fields that act as a form of erasure atop the intricately worked surface.
Presented in the quasi-domestic setting of Harper’s Apartment, Milking The Rat hearkens to Nichols’s time in Chicago, when apartment galleries thrived. Appropriately placed above the mantel, Nichols’s multi-panel painting Mantel (casket) began as an homage to Fernand Léger’s Untitled (Fireplace Mantel), before it was transformed into an airy, impressionistic field of flowers. The piece is composed of six individually stretched canvases encased in a walnut frame—a feat of craftsmanship that is a hallmark of Nichols’s practice. The four inset canvases were hauled across the floor, collecting “studio dust” on their surfaces, creating a visual and metaphorical window into his practice.
Around the room, four tondos dot the wall, each with varying degrees of recognizable motifs. The paintings bear the weight of trawled, reworked surfaces, each marked with palette scrapings along the edges, offering yet another glimpse into his process. Paradise Through the Blinds carries the heaviest application of paint, with its imagery drawn into the thickly coated white surface. The title of this piece playfully nods to a past experience that became an indelible part of Nichols’s practice: in 2012, Nichols was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard when he lost vision in his right eye, the result of a traumatic workplace accident. Just like the story’s narrator, he (temporarily) became a one-eyed artist. Nichols describes his experience as “a merging of everything together. A blurring of the visual world to the point of dissolution.” Though his eyesight returned after surgery, the year of blindness opened Nichols to a new way of seeing—one that does not assume absolutes except that there is beauty in the world.
Matt Nichols (b. 1981, Camp Pendleton, CA) received a BA from UC Berkeley in 2003, and an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. Most recently, his work has been exhibited at Julius Caesar, Chicago (2019); Andrew Rafacz, Chicago (2018); Steve Turner, Santa Monica (2017); Wilding Cran, Los Angeles (2017); DePaul Art Museum, Chicago (2016); MOUNTAIN, Brooklyn (2016); and Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (2015). He has participated in artist residencies at Skowhegan, Skowhegan, ME (2015); ACRE, Steuben, WI (2012 and 2010); and Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, BE (2009). Nichols lives and works in Los Angeles.