MATTHEW HINDLEY
(b. 1974 Cape Town, South Africa)

‘Abstraction makes an appearance via the studio walls – experiments for paintings as experiments in paintings’

- Jacqueline Nurse, 2018

As one of the South Africa's most recognised contemporary painters, Hindley’s intense, poetic and delving artworks have featured in various seminal South African and international exhibitions. With a series of solo exhibitions charting his trajectory from figuration to abstraction, Hindley has now fully engaged the sensational capabilities of the latter, pushing every centimetre of his surfaces in order to stimulate the full spectrum of experiential reaction, while searching for his own uniquely recognisable voice within the idiom.

Without the commitment to an explicit narrative found in figurative compositions, this conceptual shift from metaphorical to ontological surrenders the freedom of interpretation to the audience. The specificity of figures is abandoned for the potential of universality. Arrangements seem capacious and immersive, engaging the viewer while still imagining freedom of movement beyond the works’ edges. 

Hindley’s process relies on the raw building blocks that classically make up a painting: line, colour and form. He explores each of these formal aspects, while encouraging paint to be paint, inventing and developing an expanding array of applications. Energetic compositions arrive as a captured moment in time and depart ever-changing and unending. Some paintings break out of the conventional containment of the canvas, and escape onto the frames. This serves to disrupt their visual finiteness. The extension of the painting onto the frame itself expands the work by incorporating a sculptural quality, destabilising the definition between painting and object.

His more recent pieces, focusing on physical dimensionality and light and shade, continue to explore with an almost childlike wonder the possibilities of paint. Hindley’s works present as an exuberant experience celebrating the formal aspects of abstract painting while also revealing the richness of Hindley’s adaptive and transformative practice.

Hindley presented a short film at the world renowned Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, Michigan (2012) and the Kochi Muziris Biennale, India (2012). In 2014 he worked on a series of paintings inspired by the mythological African tales of South African writer Don Mattera, for a book published by Rhodeworks in Berlin, Germany. In 2015 his artwork was part of the imago mundi Benetton Collection at the Venice Biennale. Also in that year, Hindley participated in TWENTY: Contemporary art from South Africa, which travelled from Turchin Centre for the Visual Arts, North Carolina,  to the Beijing Biennale, China. In early 2019, his major public sculpture Speak Naturally and Continuously was upgraded and reinstalled above the entrance of the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2021, Hindley was included in the survey show National Identity at the ESPRONCEDA Institute of Art and Culture in Barcelona, Spain, alongside other acclaimed South African artists, including William Kentridge and Zanele Muholi.

Hindley maintains an interest in the possibilities of science to produce art, expressed in a number of key works. His ongoing engagement with technology inserts an interactive realm of vision and experience. This reactivity to the present physical world is a typical feature of Hindley’s new media projects, such as Speak naturally and continuously. The work, displayed permanently above the entrance of the Iziko South African National Gallery, listens to conversations in the gallery atrium, translating them into a dadaistic and poetic stream of text that runs live across a dot matrix screen.

More recent examples of his ongoing interaction with technology are his electronic paintings, where a camera in the frame feeds projections through a translucent abstracted surface, creating a living portrait. As the scenes in front of the camera constantly shift, so does the image, and the viewer is confronted with the landscapes of their own contemporary existence. 

The optical functioning of the electronic works also references Hindley’s series of rainbow paintings through their mutual foundation in the splitting of light into a prism, allowing his love of paint to connect to the contemporary technological era. ‘The rainbow is the expression of the infinite possibilities of colour,’ Hindley explains. ‘To the artist, it’s the basis of the colour palette itself. The dispersal of white light into its component colours offers a kind of unlocking, a window into a miraculous world.’

Matthew Hindley graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, in 2002. He was awarded the Michaelis Prize for the best final exhibition in his year. He is currently based in Cape Town. 

EDUCATION

2002 Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 

2023 Memoryscapes, Everard Read, Franschhoek, South Africa

2021 Double Rainbow, Knysna Fine Art, Knysna, South Africa

2019 The Brush Itself Incites, Vault Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa 

2018 The Divided Self, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

        Survey of Risk, David Krut, Johannesburg, South Africa

2015 Resurrection (Der Brennende Wald), Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

        The Five Magic Pebbles & other stories (by Don Mattera), David Krut Projects, Cape Town, South Africa

2013 Twilight of the Idols, Biksady Galeria, Budapest, Hungary

2012 One Pearl of Great Price, VOLTA8, Basel, Switzerland

2011 The Solo Project, Basel, Switzerland

        An Everlasting Once, Brundyn+, Cape Town, South Africa

2009 Like, like, like, like a Circus, Brundyn+ Wembley Project Space, Cape Town, South Africa

        Black Out, Brundyn+, Cape Town, South Africa

2007 Private Vernissage (with Kromschröder & Pfannenschmidt), Berlin, Germany

2006 Before My Time, 34Long, Cape Town, South Africa

2005 Speak Naturally & Continuously, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

2004 Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn, South Africa

        Surrender, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024 Winter Collection, Everard Read, Franschhoek, South Africa

2023 What I Feel When I Think About The Cosmos, Everard Read, Franschhoek, South Africa

2023 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

        Collide, Featherstone Centre for the Arts, Massachusetts, USA 

2022 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa 

        Pop-Up, Atelier Louis & Artloft, Hasselt, Belgium
        Spring, Everard Read, Franschhoek, South Africa

        Things I’d like to remember, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2021 Summer 2021, Everard Read, London, UK

        Offering, Everard Read, Franschhoek, South Africa

        In Conversation, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

        Oasis, 25th Anniversary Exhibition, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2020 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa
        IMAGO, Everard Read, Franschhoek, South Africa 

        TINY2020, Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa
        Journeys of the Mind, Everard Read, Franschhoek, South Africa

        Staring Straight to the Future, Everard Read, South Africa & UK

2019 Filling in the Gaps, Iziko South Africa National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

        Self, Gallery at Glen Carlou, Stellenbosch, South Africa 

       Context Art Miami, with Everard Read, Miami, USA

2018 Summer, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

        Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

        People & Portraiture, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2017 FNB Joburg Art Fair, with Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa

        Winter Collection, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

        Turbine Art Fair with 50ty/50ty, Johannesburg, South Africa

2016 365 Days of Projects & Collaborations, David Krut, Johannesburg, South Africa

        AKAA Art Fair, with Everard Read, Paris, France

        FNB JOBURG Art Fair, David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, South Africa

        Inch x Inch, David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, South Africa

        Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

        Nocturne, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2015 Homage,  Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

        Empire,  Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

        Imago Mundi - Map of New Art, Benetton Collection, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice Biennale, Italy 

2014 TWENTY: Contemporary Art from South Africa, Turchin, Centre for the Visual Arts, Appalachian State University,  North Carolina, USA; Beijing Biennale, China

2013 Material/Representation, Brundyn+, Cape Town, South Africa

2012 Collateral Segment - BRICS, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India

        Global Groove, Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan, USA

2010 Spier Contemporary Biennial, Cape Town, South Africa

2009 Dada South, South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

2007 South African Art, Danubiana Art Museum, Bratislava, Hungary

2005 Videobrazil, WWWF Anthology Performance, Brazil

2004 A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa, National Center for African American Arts, Boston, USA

2003 On the road again, Engler & Piper Projekte, Berlin, Germany

        MTN New Contemporaries, Museum Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa

2002 In no particular order (vol.1), 16th Rencontres Video Art Plastique, Normandy, France

2001 World Wide Video festival, Arti et Amicae, Amsterdam, Netherlands

AWARDS

2005 Winner of the permanent public art installation competition, South African National Gallery

2002 Michaelis Prize, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

2002 Simon Gershin prize, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

1994 Irma Stern prize, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Vass László Collection, Veszprém, Hungary

IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

University of Cape Town Collection, Cape Town, South Africa

PUBLICATIONS 

2014 Artwork for The Five Magic Pebbles, and other stories written by Don Mattera, published by Rhodeworks, Berlin

2004 A Decade of Democracy: South African Art 1994-2004, edited by Emma Bedford, published by the Iziko Museums of Cape Town, South African National Gallery