Matt Bollinger
February 4, 2026
Volume 2
Issue 18
Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?
Matt Bollinger: I'm drawn to handmade things, seeing the traces of the making. Painting's innate plasticity excites me and all the various ways people use it. For me there's something transformative in the process of finding form for events or stories from the world or the imagination. But I also love the material itself. In the morning I make tea and go into the studio. I have a big set of shelves full of jars and jugs and tubes of paint. I get a thrill from that, from squeezing paint out or stirring together a mixture. I have a cart with colors I've mixed up and I can pick them up and arrange a palette. The alchemy of paint--my mixtures in cups with lids gradually thickening to the perfect consistency--it is innately seductive stuff. Because of the handmade qualities that attract me, I love seeing how the strange individuality of the painter gets caught on the canvas, seems to live there.
GB: When you look at painters whose work feels unmistakably their own—artists you return to for that sense of individuality—do you think that quality is something they’re consciously trying to achieve, or is it something that emerges once intention gives way to the physical and procedural realities of painting?
MB: I think that sense of individuality has to come from the process or it reads as affectation. The cumulative problem solving decisions shape the appearance of the work. Sometimes something new emerges and I find myself wondering if this is what my stuff is going to look like now? There are all of these internal metrics of taste and sensibility that determine what gets to stay in a painting. I was thinking about the way Mernet Larsen said she started using her blocky figures. All of the old perspective manuals she was looking at to solve how to make space had figures made from simple solids. When she put more organic figures against those geometric environments they clashed. Making blocky figures solved this second problem and opened up a hugely more individual and weirder way of making things. In the Guston documentary, he talks about his ab-ex work as though he was climbing a mountain and had almost gotten to the top, but then he saw a side path and said, "I wonder what's over here." Those side quests are really what it's all about.
GB: Your paintings don’t feel like they announce change; they kind of absorb it. I’m wondering how you experience that from the inside. When something starts to veer—just slightly—do you try to correct it, or do you go on the side quest and see where it leads?
MB: In the past, I made more abrupt changes in my work. After a show I had back in 2008, I quit oil painting and changed my process entirely. For about two years I made nothing but drawings. When I returned to working with color, I made painted paper collages and did that for a few years. More recently the changes have been incremental. I think being absorbed into the work has made those small changes feel significant and it's likely I'm more attached to the language I've been developing in my paintings. For the first time, I've lost the feeling of being encumbered by a desire to make the work differently, which in the past presented as a restless feeling. Perhaps I've landed on something that feels more natural. Just the same, the work changes all of the time to me in a large part because I shift how I approach my subjects. For instance, I've recently been working with images of figures in motion, which is new to me outside of my animations. Last year I finished a big painting of a parade where different depths of figures are passing by, the foreground group moving toward the left seems to notice that they're being watched and look out at the viewer. This combination of a "scene" with an awareness of the audience had an interesting tension to me. The canvas seemed too big with too much of a feeling of being able to walk into it to not have the world of the painting notice me standing there.
Flashe and acrylic on canvas
96 x 144”
2025
Photo by Paul Salveson
Photo by Paul Salveson
Flashe and acrylic on canvas
60 x 78”
2025
Photo by Paul Salveson
Matt Bollinger (b. 1980 Kansas City, MO) was awarded a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute (2003) and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Art and Design (2007). His recent solo exhibitions include François Ghebaly, New York; mother’s tankstation, London and Dublin; Zürcher Gallery, New York and Paris; and M+B, Los Angeles. Bollinger’s work has featured in recent museum exhibitions including The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania (2022); South Bend Museum of Art, Indiana (2020); Phillips Museum, Lancaster, Pennsylvania (2018); Nerman Museum, Overland Park, Kansas (2016); and Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Saint-Etienne (2016).