Matthew Picton, in his exhibition The Age of Kali at Nancy Toomey Fine Art, has created a stunning body of hand-cut mixed media works filled with vitality, historical context, precision, and depth. Through the collating of images and the collapsing of time, dynamic representations of divinity are placed in the present, synthesizing coincident visuals of apocalyptic longing and salvation. Adding weight and power through scale and imagery, Picton explores the many manifestations of contemporary hybridized images of the past, religion, and culture, one in which the viewer can find their own recognition of the patterns of history.
Matthew Picton
After Life, 2020
Altered and cut photographs UV Plexi
44 x 87.5 inches (framed)
$28,000
In After Life Matthew Picton has recreated Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut panel The Seven Trumpets Are Given to the Angels in its entirety, greatly enlarging and combining it with multiple imagery. Picton has hand cut through Dürer’s imagery with a cityscape of Panama City, photographs of the wreckage of the Bahamas after it was hit by Hurricane Dorian in 2019, and Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! painting. The angels blowing the trumpets are the two conquistadors Pedro de Alvarado and Francisco Pizarro. Underneath the surface imagery lie enlarged photographs of cracking ice flows in the Antarctic and a forest fire. “The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up” (King James Version, John 8.7).
Matthew Picton
New Delhi #2, 1947, 2021
Cut and altered photographs, Yupo paper, archival inks
64 x 64 inches (framed)
$30,000
The underlying layer of Matthew Picton’s New Delhi #2, 1947 is a street map of the city with references to its Colonial past. Picton has hand cut through a series of images that depict the boarding of trains leaving from India to Pakistan. One third of New Delhi’s population left for Pakistan as part of the biggest migration in human history, an estimated 15 million people were uprooted along religious lines.
Matthew Picton
New Delhi #1, The Age of Kali, 2021
Cut and altered photographs, prints, gold leaf, UV Plexi
64.25 x 64.25 inches (framed)
$30,000
In New Delhi #1, The Age of Kali Matthew Picton cut through prints of his other mixed media work The Age of Kali and combined it with an amalgamated template of clouds and storms from Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts. Prior to the British there had been seven incarnations of the city of Delhi, and scattered across the expanse of today’s vast metropolis lie the ruined monuments, mosques, mausoleums of the ancient cities, witness to the rise and fall of past civilizations and empires. Picton chose the background of this sculpture imagery from the seven cities as they attest to the past conquerors and builders, which are bisected by the concentric circular form of the British Empire’s imperial capital. In the very center is the former Viceroy’s house, which is now the Indian Presidential house known as Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Matthew Picton
Death Foretold, 2021
Cut and Altered photographs
Tru Vue Optium Plexi
43 x 48 inches (framed)
$18,000
The West Rose window of Chartres Cathedral in France depicts the Last Judgement, the final and eternal judgment by God of all humanity in Christianity. In Death Foretold Matthew Picton has hand cut through the printed image of the stained glass and combined it with a reconfigured version of Albrecht Dürer’s Last Judgement from his series of 15 woodcuts The Apocalypse of Saint John from 1498. Hindu god Shiva “The Destroyer” and Dürer’s angels from the Book of Revelations can be seen through this layer.
Matthew Picton
The Age of Kali, 2021
Altered archival print, UV Plexi
52.25 x 38.5 (framed)
Edition of 2
$15,000
In The Age of Kali Matthew Picton multiplies an image of the Hindu goddess Kali and combines it with Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of The Archangel Michael Fighting the Dragon. Kali, destroyer of evil forces, stands on the corpse of Hindu god Shiva. Kali, the divine protector, is also worshipped as the preserver of nature. In Christianity, Archangel Michael is the leader of the Lord’s army, the protector against the forces of evil. Picton’s work combines these two central archetypes of Christianity and Hinduism. Kali Yuga in Hinduism is the fourth and last of the four world ages (yugas), each lasting thousands of years. The Age of Kali is believed to be our own cycle of rampant discord. Preceded by Dvapara Yuga and to be followed by Krita Yuga, the arch of the Age of Kali is believed to be completed by 2070, a timeline that loosely parallels Christian history since the birth of Christ, one that has encompassed fantastic beauty and dispiriting savagery.
Matthew Picton
The Ring, 2020
Cut archival printed images gold leaf, Tru Vue Optium UV Plexi
42.25 x 42.5 inches (framed)
$16,000
The surface imagery of Matthew Picton’s hand-cut sculptural drawing combines Albrecht Dürer’s The Four Avenging Angels (1498) with Arthur Rackham’s illustration The Ride of the Valkyries (1910). Below this is a dissected print of the sculpture Dresden 1945 that Picton created in 2012. This sculpture was created from a burnt music score of Wagner’s Ring cycle. The German city of Dresden was completely destroyed by fire on the night of February 13, 1945; the entire city was effectively incinerated. Picton’s sculpture of Dresden uses the music score of Richard Wagner’s The Ring, itself born out of revolution and influenced by ideological and destructive fantasies. After 500 years of Colonial exploitation and subjugation Europe finally turned the violence and destruction in on itself, the end result being the destruction of many of its own cities.
Matthew Picton
Past, Present, and Future, 2021
Altered archival print, UV Plexi
43 x 27 inches (framed)
$9,000
In Matthew Picton’s hand-cut mixed media work Past, Present, and Future, the Hindu god Vishnu–the preserver, the restorer of cosmic order, the supreme being for the transformation of the universe–is combined with four depictions of the Christian God by Albrecht Dürer. The three pronged trident symbolizes past, present, and future, as well as creation, maintenance, and destruction. The serpent represents the ever-changing world. Picton’s hybridized image looks in all directions, with multiple sightlines to all points within a room.
Matthew Picton
The Angels and the Horns, 2021
Cut and altered photograph
Tru Vue Optium UV Plexi
35.375 x 41 inches (framed)
$12,500
The South Rose window of Chartres Cathedral in France depicts the apocalypse with Christ at the center. In The Angels and the Horns Matthew Picton has hand cut through the print image of this stained glass with angels from multiple Albrecht Dürer woodcarvings.
Matthew Picton
The Four Riders of the Apocalypse, 2019
Archival black paper, photographs, ink, pins
64 x 45 inches (framed)
$20,000
In 1498 Albrecht Dürer illustrated the evocations and prophesies of the apocalypse, as foretold in the Bible’s Book of Revelation, in a series of 15 woodcuts titled The Apocalypse of Saint John. Perhaps the most well known of these is the drawing of the The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, which represent conquest, war, famine, and death. Matthew Picton, in his mixed media work The Four Riders of the Apocalypse, has enlarged the original print of 15 by 11 inches to 6 feet, and hand cut away all the white areas that would have been the original cut parts in the woodcut, resulting in a solid black line drawing suspended over stained and faded imagery from Berlin in 1945.
Matthew Picton
The Fall of Stars, 2019
Cut and altered photograph
21.5 x 31.25 inches (framed)
$6,000
In The Fall of Stars Matthew Picton has hand cut through and combined a digital photograph of the catastrophic fire in Oregon’s Columbia Gorge in 2018 with a detail of Albrecht Dürer’s 1498 woodcut of the same name. “And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in Heaven shall be shaken” (King James Version, Mark 13.25).
Matthew Picton
Adam Tills the Soil, 2020
Cut and altered photographs,
Archival print of New York Times front page
32.75 x 26.5 inches (framed)
$8,000
In Adam Tills the Soil Matthew Picton has hand cut through The New York Times front page with an image depicting the forest fires in California from September 25, 2020, with the Hans Holbein the Younger image of the same name from his 1538 The Dance of Death series of woodcuts. The lower image depicts masked card players in Queens, New York City, during the pandemic. Picton has smoked the work with taper candles.
Matthew Picton
Fears Mount, 2020
Altered photographs UV Plexi,
Archival print of Financial Times front page
36 x 29 inches (framed)
$8,000
In Fears Mount Matthew Picton has cut through the front page of the Financial Times from early March 2019–with the headline “Fears Mount” and images of four medical staff in protective face masks–and combined it with Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ploughman from his 1538 The Dance of Death series of woodcuts. The lower layer is a close up image of a locust storm over Rajasthan India from 2019, one of the most devastating in recorded history.
Matthew Picton
Los Angeles #2, Bladerunner, 2016
Archival book covers, film posters, text
41 x 41 inches (framed)
$12,500
Matthew Picton created Los Angeles #2, Bladerunner by hand cutting through a poster of the classic neo-noir film Bladerunner. Behind this Picton has combined fragmented book covers from Los Angeles noir fiction classics, including, The Big Nowhere, White Jazz, LA Confidential, and The Black Dahlia by James Elroy, Mildred Pierce and Double Indemnity by James McCain, The Day of The Locust by Nathaniel West, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy, Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante, Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Angers, and the classic documentary studies City of Quartz by Mike Davis and Southern California: An Island on the Land by Carey McWilliams. In between these layers, and following the main street, are lines of text and quotes relating to the history of Los Angeles. The quote which runs the circumference of the work is from Carey McWilliams’s 1946 non-fiction book Southern California, and reads, “The belief in some awful fate that will some day engulf the region is widespread and persistent.”
Detail view