Matt Carey-Williams

Matt Carey-Williams

matt_careywilliams

And, just like that, your name sits above a door opening into a small space you finally get to call your own. I’m gluey with glee to confirm the news of my eponymous venture: a curatorial project, running at two speeds, displaying single #artist Scenes in my humble shop-window studio in London’s cosy #connaughtvillage alongside group-show Episodes held across changing international locations. The first one, “Bump”, is a journey through #painting, featuring 21 amazing #artists, and which opens on 7 March at #9corkstreet in #london. More on that big fucker later. My first Scene is with the ludicrously brilliant #glenpudvine. He’s called it “Mug”. Check out why by reading my essay about it on my new website. Glen’s “Mug” opens at #12porchesterplace in London, W2 on 6 February at 6pm. Stick it in your diary, kids. There might be beer. Might? Who am I fucking kidding? I owe so many beers to so many people for getting me to this point without going totally fucking nuts. Them and me. My dear husband, for being a Duracell of constant empowerment. Ferg, for taking care of business like the fucking Fergmeister he is. Melanie Gerlis at the #ft and Anny Shaw at #theartnewspaper for their generous words. Emma, Daniel and Matt at the design studio, #apracticeforeverydaylife for their achingly chic less-is-more lustration. Sam, Matthew and Alex at #samtalbot PR for their juice and confidence in this enterprise. The wonderful Sophie Davidson for her photos of my mug that made my Mum very happy. Ema at #xxijrahii for her greathearted collaboration with Glen’s Scene and, of course, to Glen himself for being the fucking superstar he is, pushing many boundaries and more buttons as he continues to make searching paintings that glide between the Banal and the Absurd, frothy with irony and inquiry, trying to get a handle on this freaky, formidable, funny old thing we call life. Which all chimes perfectly with the mid-life, full-moon lunacy a 52-year old would display when giving up a perfectly decent job to set up his own #art adventure in the middle of a Tory-toned cost of living crisis. Uh oh. Bring it the fuck on, I say. The hard work begins. The fun’s already started. #leggo

2024.01.19 17:00

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Water swims around Abbie Horberry’s “Salao” (2025) in delectable agitation with her typically amorphous yet correlative ground offering waves on a turbulent ocean in an orchestra of blues, pale lilacs and whites. Once again, her painted rivulets unite with yet resist against her corrugated, stained ground, their action – as dictated by the artist – intuitive and even automatic. More than any other work by Abbie in “Scene XI: a world of dew”, “Salao” embraces an approach to painting that mirrors the stream-of-consciousness writing found in novels such as Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and The Sea” (1952) or Clarice Lispector’s “Água Viva” (1973). Hemingway employed the sea to differentiate between known and unknown – the conscious and subconscious - but also to mark the oscillation between the two. So it is that Abbie’s ground peaks and troughs between marks knowingly executed and those that seem to fashion themselves. Her task being the orchestration and interconnection of the two. The influence of Hemingway on Abbie’s practice runs deep and particularly so in “Salao”. The title means ‘very unlucky’ in Spanish slang and Hemingway uses it at the beginning of “The Old Man and The Sea” to describe Santiago’s lack of fortune, having not caught a fish for the past 84 days. As already noted, chance and luck play their part in Abbie’s enterprise at her invitation, much in the same way that luck – or the lack thereof – does in Hemingway’s novella. However, fate, resilience and hope also permeate both Hemingway’s text and Abbie’s painted surface, and it is that shared defiance – of mark over ground; of motion over form; of (wo)man over the elements – that weaves its way through their synergy, articulated by the acuity of word and gesture as they revel in the immensity and mystery of otherness. A humdinger of a painting, “Salao” is a major part of my forthcoming eleventh Scene at my space on Porchester Place, opening tomorrow at 6pm. All are very welcome. #emergingartist #painting #contemporarypainting #artinlondon #artist
Fire - that arena of aureate light and fanciful celebration but also of feverish contest and the torment of Hades - signifies the belly of the earth’s mantle; the passion of the heart; the transportation of the soul from Earth to Heaven. Abbie Horberry’s “Aether” (2025), however, only reveals the embers of a fire about to go out – the sun about to go down or the last radiation of a star in a far-off galaxy. Heat is cooled to passages of papal purples, made cooler still by the nebulae of blue marks that float around the ground like shrinking ghosts. The wrinkles of the surface – perhaps a distant planet’s scars or the capillaries under your skin – also serve to contain this fire, offering cohesion through, ironically, a haphazard stream of lines that, in effect, function like a stream of consciousness: a thought process that, much like Abbie’s painted surface, eschews dimension or perspective and privileges an intertwined entanglement of mark and moment. The Polaris fire that offers the light to guide the artist and their viewer home burns gently within this composition. Nonetheless, it is a light that illuminates the interconnectedness of Abbie’s surface - the painted mark on the dyed ground enlivened by the meandering threads proffered by itself - but which also allows her surface to swell and slough between macro panoramas and snippets of quantum litotes. The mauve light energises this ongoing contradistinction, allowing Abbie’s surface to remain free enough to assume any number of planar or perceptual positions. This, in turn, further feeds the flux of the wind; the flux generated by seeing insects under a microscope or the moon through a telescope is akin to looking at a painting by Abbie. It’s a flux that transforms known into unknown, that abstracts reality, that ultimately offers the viewer a map – not an atlas – to free-fall into the very essence of Issa’s dewdrop. That moment of utter clarity followed by the silence of memory and longing. “Scene XI: a world of dew” opens on Wednesday 4 June. Come see. #emergingartist #contemporarypainting #artist #contemporaryart #artinlondon
Abbie Horberry’s “Veins” (2025) offers up a painterly tempest. Frenzied swirls of pea greens and oxidized reds engage in a battle purloined from the annals of Futurism or the École de Paris. Such is the tempo of wind here that Abbie’s ground implodes in on itself with her canvas splintering into threads that arc across the surface or ruffle together at the lower right corner, as if to batten down the hatches. If the wind soothes with sublime suggestion in Aaron Kudi’s “Quattro Stagioni Runs” then, here, its violence runs wild across a ‘scape so intensely battered that it coalesces into pure abstraction. Only the wind remains. This small but determined painting powerfully displays Abbie’s desire to elicit what Immanuel Kant called ‘purposiveness without purpose’. So abstract, so mellifluous has the artist’s surface become that the viewer has no way to know how to enter or exit space which, in turn, nourishes the status of the painting not just as an phenomenological object – a thing simply to be seen and not read - but also fuels the process which endeavours to determine such impalpability of discourse or narrative (but not meaning). The goal is to simply sail on the wind for the sheer joy of doing so and to let the rendition of that flight and flux sit outside of any confines provided by empiricism or objectivity. This is the freedom which Abbie displays in her paintings – the engine of her enterprise – and which gives her the permission to delight in the inchoate ambiguity of life without any need to determine the sanctity of place or person. Abbie’s “Veins” are included in my forthcoming two-person presentation, “Scene XI: a world of dew”. The show opens on Wednesday 4 June at my space on Porchester Place and all are so very welcome. #artinlondon #emergingart #emergingartist #painting #painter #contemporaryart #art #artist
Today I celebrate 14 years of being married to my darling husband, Donnie. Our ‘marriage’ is, technically, a ‘civil partnership’ because same-sex couples could only legally get married in the UK in 2014. Next month we will convert our partnership into a marriage with just a couple of quick signatures in a Westminster Council office. No frills. No spills. We do so for no other reason than to gain full marriage rights for our relationship in the US as my dear husband is both American (by birth) and British (by marriage). Currently we don’t enjoy such rights there. Our decision, however, is also propelled by the deeply worrying erosion of equal rights fostered by many governments across the world but, most notably, of late, in America. Women, people of colour, members of the wider LGBTQ+ family (to name but a few communities) have, in just a blink of an eye, seen their human rights - to love who and how they choose; to have the same chances in life as others; to hold domain over their own bodies - attacked by a new administration in the US that seems hellbent on not just denying equal rights but destroying them. So, for us, being a ‘fully’ married gay couple - occupying the very same status as Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary who live across the street with their 2.4 children and their Volvo - is a somewhat political act. A quiet form of resistance, if you will. We, as a gay couple, only want (or deserve) what everyone else in the world has the right to want (and have). No more. No less. No Trans, Black or Queer he, she or they wants to be treated any differently from anyone else. They just want what we all fucking want which is a peaceful, happy, prosperous life. One shared with whoever you choose to share that with, carving out a life with minds and bodies that only you control, unflustered by myopia or bigotry. One day we’ll all have that but, for now, we simply don’t. So, my loves (of all colours, flavours and fancies), now is the time to buckle the fuck up, hunker the fuck down and let the tangerine tempest pass. Happy Anniversary, Bean! How I love you so. #lgbtq #loveislove #lovewins #gayhusbands #gaymarriage #gayrights
The bounty of Nature may well be the propellor for much of José Jun Martínez’s foray into the forest of memories and desire he so powerfully intimates in this Scene of his, my eighth to be shown at my space on Porchester Place, W2. However, the more carnal, fleshy, leafy moments of these compositions are made more poetic and sophisticated by José’s keen interest in fusing the physical with the mystical; a virtue of both Rivera’s painting and Ribera Chevremont’s poetry. “Between the spectral and the pallid” (2025) energetically reveals the contest and the synergy between forces both familiar and esoteric. Darting, exploratory strokes of the same sky blue previously employed to suggest mysterious, coupling creatures in “That which is hidden” clamber through thick, often impasto passages of sage and forest greens. Here this specific shade of blue itself signals José’s design to marry the accountable with the inexplicable, yet he does so in a rather curious manner. The depth and density of the verdant green forest is both fractured yet repaired by this sequence of sinewy blue strokes, as if each mark, emanating from another space, stitches together the place in an arc as healing as it is confrontational. The forest is filled with a bounty of flora and fauna and yet, often, one enters the forest not looking for such natural phenomena but to find a space – a haven, even – where answers to the conundrums of life and love, of being ‘here’ not ‘there’, can find you. One could easily suggest that our lives are tormented by the struggle of having to live between the polarities of being and becoming. Yet José’s ravishing paintings show us just how easy, beautiful and necessary it is to embrace and to be both: to sing this glutinous, greasy, gorgeous hymn of the toads and learn from the materiality that song (and Martínez’s corresponding brushwork) places on the majesty of mystery and the matter of meaning we all so need and yet so desperately miss. The show opens tomorrow at 6pm. All are most welcome. #art #contemporaryart #contemporarypainting #mattcareywilliams #artinlondon #emergingart #artistsoninstagram #artist
Today is the last day to see my sixth Scene, “Dean Fox: Dreams of Pathways Home”. You have until 5pm to do so. My humble space on Porchester Place never looked more alive hosting these paintings: a chorus of colour and a dance of line - agitated yet harmonic - will greet you. Then knock your socks off. It has been such a joy and a huge privilege for me, Fergus and Danele to showcase this latest, most sumptuous and decadent body of work by Dean. What a truly fabulous painter this man is. And if you thought 2024 was a busy year for Dean, then just wait ’til you see what he has in store for us in 2025. #art #contemporaryart #contemporarypainting #painting #artinlondon #deanfox #mattcareywilliams
Ever since the scythe of Brexit cut a swathe through the heart of #britain’s creative industries there’s been more than a smidge of #artworld gossip conjecturing whether #london still has it as a #contemporaryart hub. After my whizz around five fabulous #gallery shows this morning in London I’d venture to rebut any such suggestion that our capital has lost any of its cultural capital when it comes to the #visualarts. In fact I personally think anyone who thinks London has become diluted in this frame is, frankly, talking a load of old bollocks. And I speak from experience: I’ve worked for #galleries and #auctionhouses for over 27 years now and I’m also the proud owner of a very old pair of bollocks. So there. Here’s five works I absolutely loved today. All on view in London. 1. #pamevelyn’s “Deluge” (2023) at Pace Gallery. My obsession continues with the verve and viscidity of Pam’s valuation of #paint as medium, message and means of migration. A stunning show of symphonic surfaces that make screams feel like susurrations; whispers wail like whirlwinds. Incredible. 2. LOEWE’s Creative Director, #jonathananderson, has transformed Offer Waterman’s space into a labyrinth poking the optics of desire (and vice versa), triggered by duels between shapes, surfaces, colours, textures and forms. In his exhibition, “On Foot”, #doronlangberg’s “Ragworts” (2021) never looked so curious nor so beautiful. Baby does very well nestled in JW’s corner. 3. Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias’ “The apparition” (2002) at David Zwirner. Such a joyous show. One which basks in the innocence and animation that only such naïveté can inspire. 4. #mandyelsayegh’s “Interiors” at Thaddaeus Ropac is a revelation. Her command of space - its physicality and psyche; as object, environment and intervention - is utterly fabulous. This is Mandy’s “Net-Grid (madras checks)” from 2023. To die. 5. This is #sophialoeb’s majestic “All Beings Are Of All Beings” (2023). On view now at Pippy Houldsworth’s Petri dish of a gallery where early talent effloresces. Sophia is one to watch bloom, for sure. #art #artist #love
We have a #birthday and a #deathday to celebrate today (if you’re currently in Asia, that is), all with the help of our friend, moon-bound, #kpop, #bigbang superstar, #choiseunghyun. #takashimurakami was born on 1 February 1962 and turns a sprightly 61 today. The great #pietmondrian died #otd in 1944, aged 71. Both #artists remain huge inspirations for #tttop and his #music, as you can see from this #painting and that infamous jacket of his. #murakami’s double #portrait of T.O.P. and DOB, commissioned by T.O.P., is currently on view at the #busanmuseumofart as part of Murakami’s celebrated exhibition, “MurakamiZombie”. The show runs until 12 March. Go see if you’re in #korea and have the chance. You’ll fall in love, I’m sure. #art #artist #contemporaryart #musician #bigbangvip #bigbangtop #choiseunghyuntttop #painting #painter #mondrian #kawaii #otaku #koreansdoitbetter #busan
It’s been a day here in Seoul. Here’s ten things I saw today. 1. Choe U-Ram, “Angel” (2022) on view at the MMCA in Seoul as part of his exhibition, “Choe U-Ram [Little Ark]”. 2. Choe U-Ram, “Round Table” (2022). A little video of his kinetic installation included in his exhibition at the MMCA curated by the awfully clever Kim Kyoungran. Thanks for the pecan pie, Ran! 3. Choe U-Ram, “Cakra Lamp” (2013). Something I’d just love to own. 4. Korakrit Arunanondchai, “Who will testify to the time when the world was ablaze?” (2022) at Kukje Gallery. 5. Me and the fabulous Emma Son, Director of Lehmann Maupin in Seoul. 6. Giving a lecture to a group of collectors brought together by the wonderful Jackline Byun. 7. A most terribly chic client and me. She looks amazing. I, however, look utterly insane because the image has been corrupted, causing my head to look like it has collapsed in on itself. I cannot stop laughing. Anyone got any aspirin? 8. Visiting a client’s wonderful collection and being shown their gorgeous painting by Kim Whanki and us both realising - there and then - that the painting we’re looking at was executed exactly 50 years ago to the day. 9. Daniel Schine Lee, “The Proposal” (2022) as seen in his extraordinary laboratory of a studio in Itaewon. 10. Me and Daniel. Such a very, very good artist. Always testing expectations. Always pushing probabilities. Physically, aurally, sensationally. Always proving himself to be right and the rules to be utterly, desperately, tragically fucking wrong. I’m off to bed. #art #artist #artistsoninstagram #danielschinelee #seoul #contemporaryart #kimwhanki #contemporarykoreanart #koreancontemporaryart #koreansdoitbetter #mmcaseoul #choeuram #kineticart #sculpture #installation #igersseoul #myheadreallydoesntlooklikethat #ohwait #ohshit
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