Matt Lamb Retrospective at the State Russian Museum

Written by Aaron Libscomb Thursday, 03 March 2011 00:15

St. Petersburg, Russia - The one-man retrospective show of Matt Lamb, an American artist, whose oeuvre belongs to both contemporary art and outsider art, is held in the State Russian Museum in the rooms of the Marble Palace.  The exhibition shows more than a hundred of his works of different creative periods. Matt Lamb (born 1932, Chicago), a successful American businessman, started to paint in 1984, at the age of 52.  Up to that time he had established an extremely successful and diversified business and represented a classical image of a self-made man.  Suddenly the doctors made him a fatal diagnosis and he decided to take the step that radically altered his life.  On exhibition 5 April - 15 May 2007.

He went into an art supplies store and bought a huge amount of art materials.  It took a full-time businessman three years to turn into a full-time artist.  Lamb recalled how, from his very first works in paint, he was ignorant of all kinds of rules governing working with the materials: that paint in fact consists of pigment and medium, that the medium could be oil or water-based, that oil and acrylic paints do not mix, and all sorts of things besides…  It would seem, however, that even then he saw the very act of mixing paintings, something that he came to understand in the process of working, as something more than a purely technical question.

Lamb commenced his art career with still-lifes of flowers.  Lamb’s bouquets, untiringly created during these first years as an artist, were his own experimental proving ground in which he developed all possible channels of transference and transition – as a means of carrying us into a different dimension, into his own, created world.  Lamb made the process of creating his own world into his subject. First through his own technology of creation, an individual technology that is independent of the usual rules of the ordinary artist’s craft.  Then, a few years later, Lamb mythologized the material and the technique: he soaked his canvases in waters (which precise waters – those that lap the shores of Ireland or the Florida Keys – being important to the artist), and then, with the aim of creating a kind of underlayer of color, he kept it submerged in paint, before letting it dry slowly over a long period.  The result is ‘a canvas with a past’, with a past that is organic, ‘pre-writing’.  Then the artist applied his own image: the canvas is painted and repainted.  In Lamb’s artistic practice the mythologisation and ritualisation of the very process of creation, like the introduction of chronotope, play a very important role.  These things serve as channels that unite the real world and the artificial, artistic world.

By the end of the 1980s Lamb was creating his own profoundly personal world according to the rules of his own poetics.  No longer was this an all-consuming lava-environment, nor made up of separate ‘subjects’ and ‘scenes’, but a universum inhabited by quite specific characters.  Lamb’s iconography is consistent: biblical figures and his own Lambian peoples.  Peoples because they are not homogenous. Amongst them there are finished characters, which might even be seen as archetypical in the way they are defined and repeated.  There are also beings of some uncertain, unfinished kind or tribe, not yet completely modeled, as if they were still in the process of taking final physical shape.  Such, for instance, are the beings with anthropomorphic heads sitting on bodies that recall all kinds of arthropoda.  Other beings are absolutely vital inhabitants of Lamb’s world, the animals and birds, are of course quite fantastical, even if they have not quite lost their ‘genetic link’ with reality.  The unity of Lamb’s world can be felt even when the artist is focused on ‘individual representatives’ of his population and when he presents them up front, in portrait.  Even so we have a sense of the unity behind them – unity of environment, common genesis, a single source of energy.

After 9/11 the artist developed the ‘Lamb Umbrellas for Peace’ multi-stage programme.  Lamb laid its foundations by gathering together children who had lost loved ones during the terrorist act of 9/11 and giving each of them an umbrella and the simplest of materials, paints and brushes and such like. He suggested that they paint the umbrellas’ outer surfaces.  On the inner surface of the umbrellas he suggested that they stick letters written to those they had lost.  Then the children and the artist went forth onto the streets of Chicago to demonstrate, to parade, in defense of peace. ‘Lamb Umbrellas for Peace’ took root and spread around the world, both with and without Lamb’s own participation.  In May 2005 Matt Lamb painted the umbrellas for peace in Peterhof.

Today Matt Lamb ranges with the renowned contemporary artists of the world. More than 1900 of his works are presented in museums, private and public collections. His works are shown in the Vatican museums in Rome, the Pablo Picasso Museum in Horta (Spain) and Joan Miró Centre in Catalonia.  They convey the message of peace, tolerance and understanding.

The State Russian Museum today is a unique depository of artistic treasures, a leading restoration center, an authoritative institute of academic research, a major educational center and the nucleus of a network of national museums of art.

The Russian Museum collection contains circa 400.000 exhibits.  The main complex of museum buildings - the Mikhailovsky Palace and Benois Wing - houses the permanent exhibition of the Russian Museum, tracing the entire history of Russian art from the tenth to the twentieth centuries.  The museum collection embraces all forms, genres, schools and movements of art.

Visit The State Russian Museum at : http://www.rusmuseum.ru/eng/museum/