Matthew Day Jackson

American artist (born 1974)

Matthew Day Jackson (born 1974) is an American artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video, performance and installation. Since graduating with an MFA from Rutgers University in 2001, following his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, he has had numerous solo exhibitions. His work has been shown at MAMbo Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA; the Portland Museum of Art Biennial in Portland, Maine; and the Whitney Biennial Day for Night in New York.

Jackson's works utilize a familiar iconography images such as the geodesic structures of Buckminster Fuller, mankind's first steps on the moon, and the covers of Life magazine from the 1960s and 1970s and references from art history. Materials he employs have included scorched wood, molten lead, mother of pearl, precious metals, formica, and found objects such as worn T shirts, prosthetic limbs, axe handles and posters. The critic Jeffrey Kastner has noted that his works locate ‘startling beauty in their counterintuitive material juxtapositions.’ However, for Jackson beauty is frequently partnered by desolation. His work explores a concept that he terms ‘the Horriful’, the belief that everything one does has the potential to bring both beauty and horror. In one such work, titled Little Bouquet in Clay Jar (2018), the artist incorporates an aerial view of the Trinity test site, explaining that 'the job of the apocalypse or the reckoning is the job of a god or deity, but in the 20th century, it became a human possibility.' Matthew Day Jackson is represented by Hauser & Wirth and Grimm Gallery in Amsterdam.