Events
I recently moved into a new studio in Valentines Mansion in Ilford. Valentines Mansion is a spectacular 320-year-old building ‘country’ house, nestled in a leafy corner of Valentines Park in Ilford, a ten-minute bike ride from my home in Aldersbrook.
It’s my first rented studio space since I moved out of my old Hackney space in Victor House, more than ten years ago. I’ll be keeping my home studio open for the big, messy stuff, but I’m already fully settled into my new Mansion space and focusing on the small paintings that have been so popular over the last 12 months.
This studio (and 6 other studios in the building) will be open to the public on Saturday 30th November and Sunday 1st December from 12-5pm; this is a wonderful opportunity to visit this incredible building and see the beautiful spaces in which some very talented artists create their work.
Valentines Mansion & Gardens
Emerson Road, Ilford, Essex, IG1 4XA
‘Pentimento at Valentines Mansion’
Visit my solo exhibition, ‘Pentimento’, in the Mansion’s ground-floor gallery space. The gallery is open every Sunday and Monday until the 21st October.
https://valentinesmansion.com/event/pentimento-gallery-exhibition-by-matthew-webber/
Current exhibition of ‘Ten Paintings’ at Must wine bar in Wanstead.
Come for the art, stay for the first class wine list and mezze plates! Or vice versa.
Must Wine is a 3-minute walk from Wanstead station on the Central Line.
https://wansteadfringe.org/
https://mustwine.co.uk/
‘Ten Paintings’ at Must Wine
Matthew Webber in his East London studio
Photographed by Jamie Stoker in 2019 for online fashion brand Thread.
About the artist
Matthew has been making art in his East London studio for more than 25 years, exhibiting his paintings throughout the UK and the United States. Matthew’s CV can be found here.
After two decades in his Hackney studio, Matthew has now moved further East, designing his own purpose-built studio space on the edge of Epping Forest. This is where he creates his complex abstract paintings, either in the studio or working in the forest itself.
Matthew takes inspiration from this environment - the places where the urban terrain merges messily into nature.
His technique is an unusual one, in which multiple layers of oil and acrylic are methodically applied over a period of months or sometimes years, creating a dense block of imagery and paint, which is subsequently scraped and sanded away. This reversal of the process (which he calls ‘unpainting’) creates new connections and relationships, as each stage of the making reveals itself - all the way back to the very first mark.
This is when the method of making these works resembles sculpture or carving more than painting. Long-buried colours and structures emerge through the now mirror-smooth surface, creating an intricately interwoven network of lines and motifs in which both the city and the woodland landscape in which the work had its origin seem to manifest themselves.
At this stage the multiple layers of accumulated paint will either coalesce to form a finished work of art, or disappear completely, to be started again from scratch.
For a detailed CV and more information, please get in touch. To find out more about Matthew, follow him on Instagram.
Matthew’s practise recently featured in a book by the writer, Paul Maunder. Read those pages here.
