Tawharanui Looking West

Acrylic on board, framed.

Courtesy of Föenander Galleries

Matt Palmer’s New Zealand is iconic, yet intimate. His paintings explore the role desire and intimacy play in the recall of personal history and development of memory. Matt, an expat New Zealander, living in Australia, draws upon experience and a developed sense of personal mythology in depicting the land from afar.

A background in filmmaking informs Matt’s painting practice. His compositions are cinematic, atmospheric and narrative driven, while his brush work plays in the space between the painterly and photographic. His highly personalised landscapes, capture a moment in time, where light and spatial arrangement work together – tapping into something distinctly New Zealand, yet strangely universal. Through roads, dilapidated buildings, fence posts and other civilizing signs are playfully set against the vibrancy and rawness of the natural landscape, perhaps exposing both the tension and congruity of our relationship with the land.

Matt’s father is the well-known New Zealand landscape painter Stanley Palmer. Matt was brought up experiencing the New Zealand countryside from multiple angles, exploring its far reaches as he went on his father’s frequent painting excursions. Matt’s creative upbringing lead him Elam School of Art where he was taught and a further inspired by Denys Watkins; following which he moved to Sydney in the mid-nineties to explore a career as film director, working extensively on short films and music videos for which he has won a range of awards in Australia and overseas.