Sam Mattax

Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to present Dinner with Sue, an exhibition of new paintings by Sam Mattax (b.1995, Springfield, Missouri). In this new body of work, Mattax continues to develop a vision of abstraction that feels inseparable from the world it emerges from: visceral, layered, and distinctly American.

Working in thick sedimentary strata of oil, Mattax drags, scrapes, and rebuilds his surfaces until image and matter become one. These paintings feel unearthed rather than composed, as if pulled from the wreckage of memory, labor, and landscape.

Mattax’s painterly language draws from the gestural ferocity of midcentury abstraction, yet his sensibility is rooted firmly in the present. He updates Abstract Expressionism by dragging it through the wreckage of the American dream: the fairground tarp, the collapsing tent, the parking lot after rain. His forms hover between recognition and dissolution, remnants of optimism held together by the sheer act of painting.

There is an undeniable physicality here: paint that thickens into form, color that behaves like structure. But the power of these works lies less in bravura than in endurance. Mattax paints from inside the storm rather than above it, making sense of disarray through touch, rhythm, and accumulation. The compositions threaten to come apart, yet never do. They insist on coherence, not as imposed logic, but as a way to survive.

Mattax brings emotional conviction to a medium often treated with ironic distance. What emerges is not redemption but persistence: a language rebuilt from debris, direct and unsentimental. In a moment when abstraction often trades risk for atmosphere, Mattax reminds us that urgency still matters, even when belief falters.

Dinner with Sue

November 13 - December 20, 2025

Press Release