Matthew Sontheimer: Remarks
Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas
May 11 - June 9, 2001
Dunn and Brown Contemporary presents a one-person exhibition of recent work by Houston-based artist Matthew Sontheimer. The artist’s first solo show in North Texas, this exhibition includes eighteen intimate drawings and two site-specific wall drawings created by Sontheimer for Dunn and Brown Contemporary. Using ink on Mylar film, Sontheimer reveals detailed narrative drawings strictly derived from letters of his self-created alphabetical language. Through a highly complex process of tracing and erasing, Matthew Sontheimer invented his twenty-six character alphabetic code from the intricacies of his father’s signature.
Drawn across the page in a precise and systematic manner, each finished drawing of the combined characters resembles an image rather than text. Upon first glance of Sontheimer’s detailed works on paper, the connected, fuzzy edged lines appear very similar in appearance to handwriting and even legible. However, upon closer inspection, Matthew Sontheimer’s hand creates a complex system of marks and detail that is completely indecipherable. A studied examination of each drawing provides the viewer with a more intimate understanding of how personal and deliberate each individual character is within Sontheimer’s invented language. While Matthew Sontheimer expresses himself with carefully chosen words to the viewer, the specific message of each work remains personal to the artist and unintelligible to the viewer.
A site-specific wall drawing at Dunn and Brown Contemporary follows a similar site-specific work created for the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston earlier this year. In creating the wall drawing, Matthew Sontheimer writes a single line of text across the wall in his invented alphabet. Measuring no higher than four inches and running over fifteen feet, each wall drawing in the exhibition pulls the viewer for closer and more personal inspection. The subtlety of Sontheimer’s drawing reaches an extreme in that each wall drawing has been carefully covered over with a steady line of Liquid Paper. The black ink beneath the Liquid Paper faintly appears beneath the layer of off white, suggesting the former existence of Sontheimer’s personal message and his correction of that thought.
Born in 1969 in New Orleans, Louisiana, Matthew Sontheimer currently lives and works in Houston, Texas. He received his B.F.A. in 1992 from Stephen F. Austin State University, and in 1995, he received his M.F.A. from Montana State University in Bozeman. Matthew Sontheimer has been included in recent exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Jones Center for Contemporary Art in Austin, and the Galveston Art Center. Just this year, his drawings were acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York for their permanent collection.
DUNN AND BROWN CONTEMPORARY
5020 Tracy Street, Dallas, Texas 75205
www.dunnandbrown.com
