Matthew Brannon

I'm all over this artist this morning, after clapping my eyes on a couple of his pieces at Frieze last night.

"Matthew Brannon’s art lives on the edge, close to anything that will discredit or devalue it. The New York-based artist seeks a kind of self-critical disappearance that seems quietly to mock those of us who take art so seriously, including Brannon himself. We may wonder why some of what he makes counts as art in the first place – as opposed to, say, simple design – and why the stuff that isn’t normally art seems suddenly more worthy of our attention than usual. To that latter end, Brannon routinely uses the announcement cards for his shows to shift attention away from himself, asking artist friends such as Liam Gillick, Sarah Morris and Richard Phillips to lend or make a piece specifically for his promotional materials. People who don’t know Brannon could be forgiven for feeling misled when they get to the show and find that nothing looks familiar, but the intentional confusion isn’t mean-spirited. Like Maurizio Cattelan, whose collaborator Massimiliano Gioni often delivers Cattelan’s public lectures, Brannon prefers to adopt a perverted brand of self-promotion rooted equally in playful criticality and self-doubt." -  Peter Eleey