Matthew Brandt Biography

Artist Matthew Brandt was born in California and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union in New York and his MFA from UCLA. 

Matthew Brandt's photography conflates subject and material, incorporating physical elements from the sources he’s depicting to create unique compositions that are technically inventive and conceptually sly. For Lakes and Reservoirs, his landscapes were bathed in the water of their subjects; 2014’s Dust featured reproductions of historical photographs of demolished structures, rendered in pigments borne of debris collected from those buildings’ contemporary sites. For 1864, his first exhibition at Jackson Fine Art, Matthew Brandt again turns to the archives, reinterpreting George N. Barnard’s photographs of a post-Sherman Atlanta by making images of a shattered city into peach pie.

Matthew Brandt's art (b. 1982) is in the permanent collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Art Gallery of South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Cincinnati Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Royal Danish Library, National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. Matthew Brandt was one of seven artists featured in the 2015 exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography. A solo exhibition of his work, Sticky/Dusty/Wet, was presented by the Columbus Museum of Art and traveled to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014. Matthew Brandt's first monograph, Lakes and Reservoirs, co-published by Damiani and Yossi Milo Gallery, was released in Fall 2014.