NEW YORK
Matt Bollinger
Furlough
March 13 - April 29, 2021
To view the Zoom interview with Matt Bollinger and Veronique Chagnon-Burke, director of Christie’s Education, click here.
Zürcher Gallery NY is proud to present their seventh solo exhibition of Matt Bollinger in New York. Between New York and Paris, this is Bollinger’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery.
“The body of work depicts white working class people facing the various tensions of the moment. Several paintings focus on single men or groups of men “blowing off steam” after being furloughed—drinking rather than dealing with the feelings caused by being out of work—the work which so often is a source of personal definition. These are the figures that give me the greatest feeling of ambiguity, on one hand, they are like the men I knew growing up, family members or family friends, while on the other, the sort of guys who picked on me as a teenager. Super Bowl Sunday shows four men and one woman—I see the men as pairs, fathers and sons. They’re fans of the Kansas City Chiefs, my hometown team who lost the Super Bowl this year in the midst of still more controversy around the franchise’s refusal to change its racist mascot. Then there are the women who nurture (the figure in the doorway in Super Bowl Sunday brings food to the men), who do essential work to support their family (the older woman in Magic Hour who is a cashier at Walmart, alongside younger women), or who struggle to keep their small business dreams alive (Discount Mirrors or Tiffany II). Many of the threads of tension, over work, sickness, and white culture that came to a head this past year are tangled in this group of paintings.”
Matt Bollinger, Ithaca, NY, 2021
Matt Bollinger (b. 1980, Kansas City, MO) lives and works in Ithaca, NY. Bollinger earned his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2003 and his MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007. He has had 7 solo exhibitions at Zürcher Gallery, New York and 3 solo exhibitions at Galerie Zürcher, Paris. In 2020, Zürcher Gallery participated in the Armory Show for the first time with a duo-presentation of Staver and Matt Bollinger in the Focus Section, curated by Jamillah James. His animations have been included in numerous film festivals and screenings in the US and Europe. He recently had a solo exhibition, Extended Present, at the South Bend Museum of Art (South Bend, IN) and his work is currently included in Domesticity, curated by Sasha Bogojev at Volery Gallery, Dubai. Collections include: the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO), Museum of Fine Arts (Dole, France), and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (Brunswick, ME). In 2019, Zürcher Gallery published a catalogue about Bollinger’s three previous solo exhibitions at the gallery, Independence, MO (2016), Between The Days (2017) and Three Rooms (2019). The catalogue is available for purchase in person at Zürcher Gallery NY or over the phone for customers outside of NYC.