In the Studio of Contemporary Digital Artist Matthew Stone
Matthew Stone’s debut solo exhibition with Unit London incorporates AI into his unique process for the first time. Virtual Paintings features a series of works on linen, 3D printed sculpture and hand-made wooden furniture. Using repeating imagery across these varying forms, Virtual Paintings charts a network of constellations all united by Stone’s unmistakable and poetic visual language. The exhibition looks to artists such as Henri Matisse and Roy Lichtenstein, who famously rendered artist’s studios and inserted representations of their own existing artworks into the resulting pieces. Following this mise en abyme effect, Stone repeats this visual trick in reverse. He has included depictions of his own new AI-assisted paintings within three large scale and intricately composed linen canvases. These virtual AI paintings have also been devirtualised. Stone has fabricated them in physical form, displaying them on the walls of the gallery, mapping a constellatory relation to the works in which they also appear.
Matthew Stone (b.1982) is London based, multidisciplinary artist with a BA in Painting from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts of London (2004). He is best known for creating photographs that feel like Renaissance paintings, videos that feel like sculptures, and now digital painting sculptures in the metaverse. What starts off as brushstrokes on a glass panel, gets illuminated and captured through a 3D software becoming three-dimensional sculptural gestures. Selected solo exhibitions include small awakenings at CHOI&LAGER Gallery, in Seoul, Korea (2019) and NEOPHYTE at The Hole, New York, NY (2019). In 2021, Stone’s work was showcased in conversation with artists like Ithell Colquhoun and Bharti Kher in a group exhibition at Unit London, titled Song of Songs. In the United Kingdom, Stone has exhibited work at Tate Britain, the ICA and the Royal Academy of Art, and internationally at the Marrakech Biennale, Fiorucci Foundation and Viafarini, Milan.