Matthew Brandt. Mysterious forest

Erarta Museum presents the first exhibition in Russia by the American artist and concept photographer Matthew Brandt, who creates his works using silver, lake water and construction waste.

Creating unique works, Matthew Brandt creatively combines photography, sculpture, woodcut and metalwork. At the stage of film development, the artist integrates various substances into the images, from silver and lake water to dust and construction waste. Thanks to this, his work turns into a study of the relationship between the object and the technology with which it is captured.

For example, when creating the Lakes and Reservoirs series, Brandt used water from the reservoirs mentioned in the title. The series "Dust" (2014) includes reproductions of archival photographs of destroyed buildings - the artist included construction waste collected in the areas where these buildings used to be in the pigments for printing images. Working on the Bees series in 2012, the author pasted dead insects on paper, and his Night Sky series combines velvet photographic backgrounds dusted with cocaine. Brandt is sure that it is difficult to perceive his works in isolation from their history: a trip to the lake in order to draw water from it turns into a kind of performance - perhaps a little naive, but bringing a special meaning to each work.

The exhibition "Mysterious Forest" in Erarta will feature 39 large-format works from different series - they will introduce the techniques that Matthew Brandt owns. Most of the photographs are part of the Silver project: these are large-scale images of trees, made using silver and other metals. The artist created them specifically for the exhibition in Erarta: he came to St. Petersburg and went to the surrounding forests to take pictures of the plants characteristic of the region. Creative imagination helped the author to reflect the atmosphere of a mysterious forest in his works. During the exhibition, the exposition hall will turn into an immersive space: walking among the trees, viewers will feel and examine in detail each work. Visitors to Erarta will be able to feel the magic of the artist's creative method until December 5 at the Mysterious Forest exhibition. And upon its completion, works from the Silver series will be included in the museum's collection.

Matthew Brandt was born in California (USA). He graduated from Cooper Union College with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, then received a Master's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles (USA).

Brandt is not only a commercially successful artist, but also highly appreciated by the professional community. His work is featured in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Getty Center (Los Angeles). The author's works are also in the collections of the Royal Danish Library, the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen and the Columbus Museum of Art (Ohio, USA). He was one of seven artists who participated in the exhibition Light, Paper, Photo Process: A New Look at Photography (2015) organized by the Getty Center. Brandt was also a finalist for the prestigious French Prix Pictet. In 2015, the author's exhibition was held at the Paris Museum of Modern Art. Articles about the artist and his work have been published in publications such as ARTFORUM, Art in America, The New Yorker and Modern Painters.