Artist Biography
Matthew Palladino makes paintings, sculptures and drawings that use complex compositional imagery to explore cultural and political ideas. Drawing upon illustration and graphic design, the pieces playfully reference pop culture, art history, moral pitfalls and the carnivalesque. On his first visit to Shark’s, Palladino continued his series of “wonder boxes”, in which he composes a structure of confined rooms containing narrative images and intriguing plays on perspective.
In Wonder Box: Expulsion the rooms are framed with maps of Africa and tell the tale of Adam and Eve. In a second print Bad Map, Palladino exposes areas of a colorful map of the United States surrounded by water. The map and water are revealed by a graffiti-like scrawled erasure as if the image was obscured by the surface of the paper. This lithograph seamlessly combines map and scrawl in a playful political commentary. Palladino’s work is in the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as numerous private collections. Complete biography available by request.
