Art For Relief

Matthew Burrows is an artist living and working in the UK and founder of The Artist Support Pledge.

“Our artistic values must implicitly embed our environmental ideals. It is not enough to speak of change, art must furnish and colour our imaginations with the means to make change possible.” - Matthew Burrows, 2021

Burrows speaks of painting as a form of subsistence, dependent on and arising from the ground at his feet. His relationship with place is one of dwelling and ritual, a process of mythologizing, of drawing meaning from the particularities of the environment and his movement in and through it.

His paintings are reflective, thoughtful and slow to reveal a complex structural space of marks, shapes and pigment. The surfaces are tactile and graphic, opaque and transparent, fast and slow, general and specific. He finds his reality in the paradoxes and thresholds of the mystic’s landscape – a wilderness of solitude and temptation, a paradise of emptiness and rage, a country of madness and silence.

Accolades

Solo exhibitions include Beyond the Garden Wall Vigo Gallery London, London, 2017; Para-Dice Vigo Gallery, London, 2014; Cultic Twister Alexia Goethe Gallery, London, 2009; Anyone Here? Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham, 2003; A Divine Comedy Gloucester Cathedral, touring to Gloucester City Art Gallery, Huddersfield City Art Gallery, 2000-2001. 

Group exhibitions include Towards Night Towner Art Gallery Eastbourne 2017; Permeable Edge Otter Gallery Chichester 2016 WET AND DRY painting to the edges Observer Building, Hastings, with Gerard Hemsworth and Rose Wylie, 2015; London Twelve Prague City Museum 2012; Selektionseffekte Blain|Southern, Berlin, with Anton Henning, Rachel Howard, 2011; Foolish Romantics Quay Arts Centre, Isle of Wight, 2010; LayersSeongnam Arts Centre, Korea, 2010; John Moores 24 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2006. 

Awards and prizes include 20016-19 Artist Fellow University of Chichester, 1999-2000 Artist in Residence, Gloucester Cathedral, 1999-2000; 2006 John Moores 24, Prize Winner, 2006; Artist’s Residency, National Gallery, London, 2000-2001. 

www.matthewburrows.org
@matthewburrowsstudio