NEW YORK, NY.- DIMIN is presenting Matt Phillips: Recent Paintings, the newest body of work from the Brooklyn-based artist. In Matt Phillips’ light-filled studio, ambivalence, confusion and doubt are frequent companions. While his paintings are made with a limited vocabulary of motifs—grids, curving lines, geometric forms, texture, and color, the visual relationships existing between these malleable elements quickly become complex and dynamic. As Phillips suggests, poetry resides precisely within this tension. This contradiction between simplicity and complexity is difficult to reconcile, but remains at the heart of his practice.
In a 2024 Brooklyn Rail conversation with artist and writer Jason Stopa, Matt Phillips discusses an abstract painting practice rooted in luminosity, improvisation, and the productive tensions between certainty and doubt. Stopa likens Phillips' approach to “musical improvisation,” where paintings develop through a process of revision and discovery. Central to the work is a language of dualities: over and under, repetition and singularity, opacity and transparency. These tensions function not merely as formal concerns but as content. In his 2026 painting Clef, Phillips extends the conversation around improvisation using a network of looping, curvilinear forms resembling musical notes. Quite literally, bass and treble clefs that move rhythmically across the surface, create a sense of visual cadence rather than fixed composition. Interlocking bands of purple and red weave around circular forms, generating a dynamic interplay of color and form. Like an improvised musical phrase, the composition is equally structured and spontaneous, balancing movement and restraint. The painting foregrounds color and form as active agents within the work, demonstrating Phillips' belief that abstraction can communicate through impressions rather than through narrative or representation.
The discussion also highlights the artist's technical engagement with luminosity. Working with custom mixtures of powdered pigments and silica, Phillips creates highly thinned paint films that allow light to pass through the pigment and reflect off the white gesso surface beneath. This process produces a subtle internal glow evocative of frescoes and the paintings of Fra Angelico, Bonnard, Matisse, and Rothko, who have inspired Phillips’ interest in light as an active pictorial force. While Clef exemplifies Phillip’s exploration of form, his work Parapet serves as a concentrated study in luminosity. The painting is organized around a central field of the lightest and most thinned pigments, from which increasingly saturated and opaque areas radiate outward. This gradual transition allows viewers to experience the full range of Phillips' material process, from nearly translucent washes to denser accumulations of pigment. As rectilinear forms expand outward from the center, shifts in transparency, color density, and surface texture create a palpable sense of atmospheric depth. Parapet demonstrates how luminosity functions not merely as an optical effect in Phillips' work, but as a structural principle through which color, space, and perception are organized. Equally important is the relationship between the paintings and their environment. Changes in natural and ambient light continually alter the perception of color, texture, and space. The fibrous surfaces embedded within the more recognizable forms recall handmade paper or tissue, what Phillips describes as "an organic accumulation of small moments," recording the duration and evolution of the painting process itself.
Underlying these material and conceptual concerns is an acceptance of uncertainty. Phillips speaks openly about the roles of discovery and doubt in the studio, embracing spontaneity and change as essential creative tools. Ultimately, the conversation reveals a practice that understands abstraction not as an exercise in formal resolution, but as a sustained act of openness. As Phillips concludes, "The longer I paint, the more I see it as an exercise in hope."
Following a recent group presentation with DIMIN at NADA New York, Recent Paintings is Phillips’ first solo exhibition with the gallery. Previous solo exhibitions include Louis Buhl & Co, Detroit, MI; Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, NY; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL; The Landing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA; Direktorenhaus Museum, Berlin, Germany; Studio d’Arte Raffaelli, Trento, Italy; Devening Projects, Chicago, IL; and The Zillman Art Museum, Bangor Maine. He has participated in group exhibitions at Nazarian/Curcio Gallery, Los Angeles,CA; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; Harper’s, New York,NY; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY. Phillips has been an artist-in-residence at The Fores Project, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. Phillips is also an educator and critic, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
DIMIN is located in Tribeca at 406 Broadway, Fl. 2, New York, NY. For all inquiries, please contact gallery@dimin.nyc.
