James Collins
Islands Inlands

January 20 - March 23, 2024

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 20, 5-7 pm

​

Matéria is pleased to announce James Collins' second solo exhibition with the gallery Islands Inlands, with a presentation of all new paintings.

 

In Islands Inlands Detroit-based artist James Collins deepens his ongoing painting investigations employing process as content. The new works, produced with Collins’ usual custom-made tools, which include household items like shower curtains, rags, and plastic wrap, were created in 2023-2024 and reveal more explicitly the artist’s intimate connection with natural landscapes.

 

Known for the use of a primarily minimalist palette, in Islands Inlands Collins allows for intense color compositions to take place, resulting in highly energized paintings that resemble encounters with beautiful sunsets, or hidden island sanctuaries. The paintings in Islands Inlands become their own refuge, a space to rest and reconnect to the inherently available energies in nature.

 

As in nature, Collins’ works in Islands Inlands seem to present countless singular moments of fortuitous beauty, for which you have to be present to fully appreciate.

​

JAMES COLLINS

Detroit-based artist James Collins (b. 1972, Superior, Wisconsin), is known for minimalist op art and abstract works that are created through a variety of imaginative processes that embody chemistry and chance. These processes create a spacious and gestural sense of predictable unpredictability.

Collins has shown extensively nationally and internationally, including Painted Protocols at HWM in Nice France; An Anonymous System at the Rogaland Kunstsenter in Stavanger Norway; Exploring the Tributaries at Simone DeSousa Gallery in Detroit; 99 cents or Less at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Summer Group Show and What Birds Can See at Document in Chicago, IL; New American Paintings at the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL; On the Blue Shores of Silence at Tracy Williams Ltd., New York; FOG Design and Art with Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; Library Street Collective, Detroit; Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, Mich. and at the West Michigan Area Show, Kalamazoo, where he was awarded the Grand Prize in 2012.

​