Echo

Bureau is pleased to announce Matt Hoyt’s show, Vessels and Lights, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe. Vessels and Lights includes a group of sculptures displayed on low platforms as well as a suite of new colorful pattern paintings. The sculptures are a continuation of Hoyt’s ongoing practice focused on small-scale objects intended to conjure subjective and unpredictable associations. Hoyt’s handmade objects embody curiosity. They offer morphing resemblances from vast, disparate origins which always resolve back to a place of imagination and abstraction.

Hoyt first shared his grid paintings with the public in his previous solo show, Note to You, at Bureau in New York. Beginning in 2006, his painting practice had been a private, meditative one, which he described as turning to during darker emotional periods. The paintings are grounded in geometry, pattern and order, however they do bear the delicate traces of imperfection from the artist’s hand. The repeating tessellations offer an entoptic buzzing while the sculptures invite a strange and expansive potential.

Hoyt writes about his work here, describing the paintings as lights and the sculptures as vessels:

The vessels as a place to put, and perhaps put away, negative thoughts – mainly fear. Over the last few years a friend described these objects alternately as: Dark, Apocalyptic, and Brooding. I would add Wondrous. While they are in process I often find myself simultaneously mesmerized and disturbed by them.

The lights, in contrast, provide a consoling presence. Recently I noticed that much of the rhythmic logic contained in them resembles the way a kaleidoscope would operate if the reflective planes were arranged in a grid or honeycomb pattern. The words archetypal and holistic often come to my mind when considering the fundamental nature of such geometric arrangements.

I’d like the tension between these two psychological states to create a form of emotional imaging that will fill the space.

Matt Hoyt (b. 1975, Mount Kisco, NY) lives and works in New York. Hoyt received a BFA in 2000 from the School of Visual Arts. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Note To You, Bureau, New York, 2021; Einig, with Tom Thayer, Stations, Berlin, Germany, 2019; Six Winds, Bureau, New York, 2019; Chrysalis, Bureau, New York, 2017; Recent Past, 2010–2016, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 2016; One Another, Art in General, New York, 2015; It’s Always Nice to Meet You, Bureau, New York, 2014; 2006- 2011, Bureau, New York, 2012; Escalator to Common Art, with Mark Van Yetter, Dispatch, New York, 2008. Hoyt’s work was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial; MoMA PS1’s 2010 Greater New York and Jay Sanders’s 2008 White Columns Annual. Selected group exhibitions include: Strange Attractors, cur. Bob Nickas, Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles, 2017; Sunlight arrives only at its proper hour, cur. Mitchell Algus and Olivia Shao, 356 Mission, Los Angeles, 2017. Hoyt’s work is in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.