Matt Magee: Works 2012–2018

In the mid-1970s, MATT MAGEE began accompanying his geologist father on field trips from their home base in Texas to visit Native American rock art sites throughout the American West and saw hundreds of pictographs and petroglyphs. Later, while studying art history, he honed his focus on the power of simple formal marks and their power to transmit meaning. This book focuses on Magee’s practice since moving to Phoenix, AZ, in 2012, and his mining materiality, navigation, landscape, repetition, process, texting and email to produce paintings and objects that explore ways of understanding surface and sequence. 

Matt Magee (b. 1961, Paris) is an American contemporary artist who has dedicated his over four-decade career to experimenting with abstract and conceptual art practices. Best known for his minimal abstract geometric paintings, sculptures and prints, his work explores language symbolically with an emphasis on repetition and nods to art historical precedents.

Magee holds an MFA from Pratt Institute and a BA in Art History from Trinity University. The artist was awarded two resident fellowships (2007 and 2015) at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a New York State Foundation for the Arts Grant in 2002 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1991. His compositions are found in the collections of the Tucson Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Phoenix Art Museum, JP Morgan Chase Collection and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, among many others.