Sam Mattax
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to introduce Spotlight, a new series of focused presentations drawn from our ongoing conversations with artists. Conceived as something closer to a studio visit than a conventional exhibition, each Spotlight marks a moment when a new body of work has begun to take shape. Rather than waiting for that body of work to be complete, the series brings a concentrated view of the studio into the gallery, offering a snapshot of an artist’s thinking as it develops. While works presented in a Spotlight may later become part of a larger exhibition, they allow the viewer a unique opportunity to engage directly with an artist’s process at a singular moment in time.
The first Spotlight brings together three recent large-scale paintings by Sam Mattax. Built through dragging, scraping, and rebuilding, the works mark a shift in his practice as forms begin to multiply. The result is a new density and intricacy as the paintings move from strategies of accumulation toward something more rooted in the structure of the abstraction itself.