American artist Matt Bollinger creates vivid, layered tableaux that synthesize meticulous painterly technique with a unique, semi-fictional approach to narrative storytelling. In his portrayals of imagined rural Missourian communities (not far from the Ozarks of his upbringing) he combines partially-invented settings and characters with observational study, art historical reference, and personal recollection. Bollinger’s empathetic chronicles of the American working class are at once sensitive and shrewd, piercingly attuned to the perils of social and economic alienation.
