Matthew Watson makes exquisitely rendered paintings that are a complex form of social portraiture. His portraits of artists, writers, curators and collectors, interiors, art objects, books and other cultural ephemera, soften the border between subject and object. Watson inserts himself into a fluid chain of relations –– social, economic, power –– frequently working on commission or by invitation to start a painting, in turn producing objects that relay back into the very flows that led to their construction. ...
