Interview with Matt Kleberg at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2024

There is something so deceptively simple and captivating about Matt Kleberg’s paintings. They all seem to adhere to a system or a set of rules, but aren’t so obvious that interest wanes. In fact, the nuances and tweaks in colors and compositions only increases their attraction. Kleberg is currently working and living in San Antonio, Texas, the state where he was born, after spending years in New York. Space, both interior and exterior, play a role in his work and his locations over the years, from East Coast grit to the seductive land of Texas are present in his paintings. I spoke with Matt at Art Basel on opening day about the work he is showing there with Berggruen Gallery and his tips for a successful Miami Art Week.

Interview between Amy Boone-McCreesh and Matt Kleberg

A: HAVE YOU PARTICIPATED IN MIAMI ART WEEK IN THE PAST?
M:  I have. I got out of Pratt in 2015, and one of my best friends in the program was Caroline Larsen, a Canadian painter living in Brooklyn.  She was working with a woman named Katharine Mulherin who had a gallery in Toronto and a gallery in the Lower East Side. Katharine saw the work and invited me to show at Untitled. I was just out of grad school, working a rooftop landscaping job and had no major art prospects.  But at Untitled the work did really well. We got some press. A gallery in Chelsea asked to do a show. Katharine offered a show. Hiram Butler from Houston also saw the work and invited me to show with him. We’ve worked together since, and that has been a really important relationship. So Miami has actually been a big deal for me over the years.  I did Untitled a couple times and this is now the third time I’ve done Art Basel.

A: WHERE CAN WE SEE YOUR WORK THIS YEAR?

M: ​​I’m at the Berggruen booth. They are based in San Francisco and their booth at the fair is F2. It’s a nice combination of historic and contemporary work.

A: CAN YOU TALK SPECIFICALLY ABOUT THE WORKS ON VIEW?

M: So we’re showing two paintings, a large one and a small one.  The small one is a direct study for the larger, and that almost never happens. I don’t make exact studies typically. I do a lot of drawing, I keep a pad on me and I’m drawing all the time. Those small black and white ink drawings work out compositions for the larger oil paintings but there is lots of space to figure out color relationships on the canvas.  In this case I was working on a small 28 x 24”  canvas that was sort of half done and had been sitting in the studio for a couple months.  I kept not wanting to address it. ​The painting had these woven beams that looked like corrugated metal in this similar kind of architectural language that has characterized the work for the last few years. In the middle of the painting was this recessed niche, which has been happening pretty frequently over the last few years.  Niches or altar spaces or stages or thresholds.  I decided to paint over the previous image with a radial motif going around the central niche space. And it just felt like, for whatever reason, the niche space was non-essential or rote.  I decided to paint it out and repeat that radial motif, and it became more of a frame within a frame. I really liked it and thought that it would work on a larger scale. The larger one is called “Big Ecstatic Bang (Transfiguration)”. The smaller one is “Wheel Inside a Wheel”. 

A: YOU DO A LOT OF SMALL DRAWINGS AND OFTEN MAKE LARGE PAINTINGS, HOW DO YOU HANDLE SCALE CHANGE?
M: I either work very small with pocket sized drawings, or very large, with architectonic  paintings where you really feel the space physically. The challenge for me is always to try to recreate that sense of the hand from the drawings into larger paintings. I don’t use projection. I don’t use tape. I’m trying to let the hand and shoulder show up but without trying to steer it in an overly wonky, mannerist way. I still want the moves to be honest… and so, yeah, there’s always a slightly different effect from the small drawings to the larger paintings, but man, small paintings are hard!

A: YOUR PAINTINGS SEEM TO HAVE A RHYTHM OR A SYSTEM THEY ASCRIBE TO – WHAT IS YOUR PROCESS FOR MAKING AN IMAGE? 

M: ​​My background was in figuration, and I apprenticed under this guy in Fort Worth who was like a really chunky, painterly painter. You’re carving the space with the brush and it was all about the juiciness of the stroke and really digging into the paint. It felt athletic, trying to show off your chops. There are plenty of painters with more “chops” than me, but I kept finding myself going to museums or galleries and being really envious of the dumb paintings. Paintings that let themselves be simple and seemingly easy.  For me there’s usually a more complex underlying system borne out in the drawing. The paintings get overpainted a lot, but the compositions themselves, the framing of the space or the fan motifs or whatever it is, those typically don’t change much in a painting, but a lot of the color will. Certain things do get discovered as I’m painting like maybe if this overlapped that, there’d be a more interesting spatial push and pull.  I was a fan and student of art history, but I didn’t grow up in an art family.  I grew up looking at a lot of regional, provincial artists and  have always been attracted to vernacular and folk artists. There’s often a simplicity and an un-self-consciousness where the artist is not trying to show off their chops. They’re  just trying to describe a certain form with the greatest economy of marks and often with a  sense of flatness. I’m thinking here of someone like Eddie Arning.  And so, yeah, I’m always trying to play with space, but kind of bring it back to flatness. I want it to be dumbed down and then have some, I don’t know, some kind of anticipatory, expectant, triumphant, but also collapsing quality.

To go back to the system part, I’m thinking a lot about architecture. I’m not thinking of the space as purely abstract space where every move is open to me. I am one of those painters that thrives when I have parameters- parameters that can help me make a first move on canvas but then get subverted later to surprise myself.  A lot of the work is responding to previous work and there’s a lot of iteration, finding new ways to address similar formal problems. Usually, I can walk into the studio and more or less know a painting is going to have a kind of one-to-one relationship with architectural or ornamental space.  I’m trying to create a sense of dynamism out of an otherwise symmetrical or static composition, establishing a rhythm with repetitive marks or stripes or whatever. Usually the painting is in service of framing these spaces. The funny thing about this painting at Berggruen is that something changed, those parameters shifted. In another painting I might have accepted that recessed space, but in this painting it just didn’t work, it felt empty, and so it had to go. I was excited because now the parameters or the rules have shifted. It’s like a different set of givens. I don’t know what those are yet, but I’m excited about working it out.  

A: ANY TIPS FOR THOSE ATTENDING MIAMI ART WEEK OR ANYTHING YOU ARE EXCITED ABOUT SEEING? 

M: I always try to go see a couple of the satellite fairs, NADA and Untitled specifically, and there’s always some great stuff to see. I thought that Lauren Luloff’s booth at NADA with SOCO was really beautiful. So that’s a recommendation. My other recommendation is probably to stay a day or two less than you think you should because you can definitely burn yourself  out.