Tuesday, September 29, 2009

"Sweet Smell of Success" by Matthew Sweig - FRESH PICK Volume 1 Edition 23

Welcome to "The Sweet Smell of Success". This series is a fragmented self-portrait made up of the little physical evidence of the artist’s ancestral past. Further to past works dealing with urban debris and the memory of objects, this work strives to illustrate the many ways in which one views themselves. The people are distant maternal relatives captured from old photographs. The screen printed pattern is extracted from monetary notes from Czar ruled Poland from the early twentieth century where Sweig’s paternal family was at the time the photographs were taken in Canada.

Matthew Sweig is educated in the field of Landscape Architecture and practices in Toronto, Canada. Gary Michael Dault of the Globe and Mail’s review of Sweig’s “Reconstruction of a Demolition” exhibit from 2005 could equally describe this piece. “A glance at the picture reproduced here - or even a prolonged study of it - will probably not serve to identify it as a painting rather than a photograph. But a painting it assuredly is, a vastly labour-intensive, black-and-white acrylic on canvas...” More information on the artist’s original works can be found at www.matthewsweig.com. He is represented by the XEXE Gallery in Toronto, www.xexegallery.com.

Buy "The Sweet Smell of Success I" now from $45+!