David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new silkscreen prints and paintings by Matthew Brannon at ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. The exhibited works can be seen in person at Booth C04 from November 10 – 13.

Matthew Brannon is one of contemporary art’s most astute chroniclers of cultural movements and their associated signifiers. His unique silkscreen prints, paintings, and other works are the products of meticulous research and careful craft. They are also vivid personal fantasias in which recognizable forms interact mysterious ones drawn from the depths of the collective imagination. For ART021, Brannon has trained his focus on the complex visual history of the 1980s, expanding on his longstanding interest in the transformations of the 1960s and 1970s to examine a new set of icons, milestones, and art historical resonances.

The presentation features both unique silkscreen prints and paintings. As a group, their saturated hues and multi-faceted allusions constitute an immersive look at the ways in which cinema, popular music, technology, and mass media underwent pointed changes during a decade that continues to inspire nostalgia, fear, and curiosity. Brannon’s compositions depict real-world objects and objects of fantasy as closely related manifestations of a common source of innovation, hysteria, and imagination. His works–as psychological as they are critical–pinpoint the places where fact and fiction uncomfortably intersect.

If you are interested in purchasing the featured works or inquiring about additional works by Matthew Brannon, please email us here, or click "INQUIRE" below to email our team. 

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Matthew Brannon

Break Beats / Stirring Sticks / Spray Paint / Guest Lists / Soho and the South Bronx, 2022

silkscreen with hand-painted elements on paper

67 x 54 inches
(170.2 x 137.2 cm)
framed:
71 1/4 x 58 1/4 x 2 inches
(181 x 148 x 5.1 cm)

Inquire

Matthew Brannon

Adult Behavior / Complex Emotions / Rewarding Culture / Tossed Salad and White Wine, 2022

silkscreen with hand-painted elements on paper

67 x 54 inches
(170.2 x 137.2 cm)
framed:
70 1/2 x 57 1/2 x 2 inches
(179.1 x 146.1 x 5.1 cm)

Inquire

Matthew Brannon

Neon Mist in the Neural Nightclub / The Oncoming Sea of Ones and Zeros / Our Friends Electric, 2022

silkscreen with hand-painted elements on paper

67 x 54 inches
(170.2 x 137.2 cm)
framed:
70 1/2 x 57 1/2 x 2 inches
(179.1 x 146.1 x 5.1 cm)

Inquire

Matthew Brannon

Icing on the Cake, 2022

silkscreen with hand-painted elements on paper

67 x 54 inches
(170.2 x 137.2 cm)
framed:
71 1/4 x 58 1/4 x 2 inches
(181 x 148 x 5.1 cm)

Inquire

Matthew Brannon

The Predator’s Ball / Fertilizer of Greed / A Game Called Take Everything, 2022

silkscreen with hand-painted elements on paper

67 x 54 inches
(170.2 x 137.2 cm)
framed:
71 1/4 x 58 1/4 x 2 inches
(181 x 148 x 5.1 cm)

Inquire

Matthew Brannon (b. 1971, Anchorage, Alaska) has long been recognized not only for his wit and literary sensibility, but also for the precision with which he approaches his chosen mediums. He is perhaps best known for his radical approach to printmaking, which, contrary to traditional usage, frequently involves the elaborate production of unique artworks. The vocabulary and voice developed in the prints—arch and erudite, with a sharply psychoanalytic bent—has provided the center for an expanding world of objects and narratives that also includes painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Since 2015, Brannon has almost exclusively turned his attention to the Vietnam War, conducting exhaustive research for a profound engagement with this generation-defining trauma. In the multi-faceted works that emerge from this project, Brannon confronts the messy business of narrating history, creating his own versions of “primal scenes” in the American psyche.

Brannon has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Marino Marini Museum, Florence (2013); Portikus, Frankfurt (2012); Museum M, Leuven, Belgium (2010); Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York (2007); and Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2007). His work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Denver Art Museum; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; and Museo MADRE, Naples, Italy. In 2019, Gregory R. Miller & Co. published Concerning Vietnam, a book dedicated to Brannon’s multi-year project investigating the Vietnam War. Brannon lives and works in New York.

To learn more about Matthew Brannon, please view these articles from Artforum, Artforum.com, artnet.com, CNN.com, and frieze. Click to purchase a copy of his monograph, Concerning Vietnam, or The Galaxy Song, published on the occasion of his 2021 exhibition with Elijah Funk & Alix Ross (Online Ceramics). 

Photography by Kevin Frances