Recto-Verso: Matt Arbuckle at Hastings City Art Gallery

Arbuckle’s practice is a process-driven exploration of place, bridging the notions of landscape with the languages of abstraction. He manipulates the fundamentals of scale, format, composition, material, colour and mark-making to produce sculptural paintings that are large, vigorous and bold in the forms they take. Challenging the concept of space both metaphorically and physically, he imbues his paintings with complex and emotional narratives, evocative of a sense of the concrete and of the abstract.

For this exhibition, Arbuckle has continued to experiment with the process of fabric manipulation to produce a unique abstract visual landscape that favours process over outcome. In using a custom designed ‘roll-to-roll’ machine, which caused the fabric to roll from one part of the machine to the other, there was only ever 1-2 metres of fabric available for the artist to paint on. This meant the whole painting was only revealed, once unrolled. The 50 metres of finished painting has been unfurled and draped, upstretched throughout the gallery, rising to meet the ceiling from which it is tethered. Viewers are encouraged to walk through and around the material and explore the structural and emotional qualities of the work.

Recto-Verso is on view at the Hastings City Art Gallery from 24 October 2020 - 24 January 2021.