This is going to be a great opening!

Matt Wycoff  

VARIATIONS  

 January 27 – March 3, 2012  
opens Friday, January 27  (6-9pm)

beta pictoris is pleased to announce the opening of VARIATIONS, New York based artist Matt Wycoff’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.  Over the past ten years Wycoff’s work has covered a wide range of conceptual, stylistic and material approaches. 

VARIATIONS  brings together four major works from this period, two text pieces from 2006 and 2007, and two large-scale abstract paintings from 2011.  The works on view are drawn from what appear to be two visually and conceptually distinct bodies of work.  The exhibition is less about the differences between the works, however, and more about the experience of the viewer as they find the underlying themes that tie them together.

In classical music the term variation has come to mean the repetition of a musical theme with modifications of melody, rhythm or harmony.  Wycoff offers his variations in a similar spirit.  Wycoff’s main themes of identity and perception appear and reappear throughout the exhibition as they shift and change in relation to ideas such as poetry, beauty, order, abstraction, death, disaster, monumentality, color and time.  These shadings allow for a depth of experiences.  The works question the distance between the personal and the universal, confuse notions of chaos and order and use the art historical meanings of expressionism, minimalism, pop and conceptual art as tools for building a new aesthetic framework.  As an artist, Wycoff is both drawn toward and skeptical of earlier artistic attempts at universalism and deeply informed by discussions that emerged in the 1970s, 80s and 90s such as the blurring of boundaries between painting, sculpture and installation, and dialogues about deconstruction or pluralism.  Wycoff’s VARIATIONS ask the viewer to reconsider their preconceptions about artistic style, and focus on the ways in which form and content build structures of meaning.