Black and White: Matt Magee
Zane Bennett Contemporary Art
February 28 – May 17, 2025
Black and White is an exhibition of monochromatic works by Matt Magee pulled from Tamarind Institute, Woolworth Publications, Manneken Press, Obee Editions, and the artist’s studio. Together, these works show the development of Magee’s mark making since 2019. The works in this exhibit lay bare the semantics of Magee’s visual language, which is influenced by location, collaborators, and artistic inspirations. With their grid-like arrays of non-representational forms and pared back palettes, these works trace the development of asemic writing* in the artist's practice and ask how visual language might function in a post-literate world.
Learn more here.
*Asemic: a wordless, open semantic form of writing.
Matt Magee: Works 2012–2018
These works reveal Magee’s truly methodical approach and desire to showcase the handmade, but also speaks to the act of painting at its most distilled form.
— Claude Smith, New American Paintings
In the mid-1970s, Matt Magee began accompanying his geologist father on field trips from their home base in Texas to visit Indigenous 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.