In 2020, for his work creating Artist Support Pledge, Matthew Burrows was made an MBE in The Queen’s birthday honours list, received the Prime Minister’s Points of Light award, was named Apollo’s ‘Art Personality of the Year’, and was listed among the ArtReview Power 100 and number one in the Artlyst Alt Power 100 2021.
Matthew Burrows MBE (born 1971) is a contemporary British painter and founder of Artist Support Pledge, a global movement in support of artists and makers. Matthew lives and works in the UK and is represented by Vigo Gallery London.
Burrows speaks of painting as a form of subsistence, dependent on and arising from the ground at his feet. His relationship with place is one of dwelling and ritual, a process of mythologizing, of drawing meaning from the particularities of the environment and his movement in and through it.
His paintings are reflective, thoughtful and slow to reveal a complex structural space of marks, shapes and pigment. The surfaces are tactile and graphic, opaque and transparent, fast and slow, general and specific. He finds his reality in the paradoxes and thresholds of the mystic’s landscape – a wilderness of solitude and temptation, a paradise of emptiness and rage, a country of madness and silence.
Solo exhibitions include Beyond the Garden Wall Vigo Gallery London, London, 2017; Para-Dice Vigo Gallery, London, 2014; Cultic Twister Alexia Goethe Gallery, London, 2009; Anyone Here? Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham, 2003; A Divine Comedy Gloucester Cathedral, touring to Gloucester City Art Gallery, Huddersfield City Art Gallery, 2000-2001. Group exhibitions include Towards Night Towner Art Gallery Eastbourne 2017; Permeable Edge Otter Gallery Chichester 2016 WET AND DRY painting to the edges Observer Building, Hastings, with Gerard Hemsworth and Rose Wylie, 2015; London Twelve Prague City Museum 2012; Selektionseffekte Blain|Southern, Berlin, with Anton Henning, Rachel Howard, 2011;Foolish Romantics Quay Arts Centre, Isle of Wight, 2010;LayersSeongnam Arts Centre, Korea, 2010;John Moores 24 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2006. Awards and prizes include 20016-19 Artist Fellow University of Chichester, 1999-2000 Artist in Residence, Gloucester Cathedral, 1999-2000; 2006 John Moores 24, Prize Winner, 2006; Artist’s Residency, National Gallery, London, 2000-2001.
Matthew Burrows was born in the Wirral UK in 1971. He currently lives and works in East Sussex. He studied as an undergraduate at Birmingham School of Art in 1990-93 and graduated with a Master’s degree in painting from the Royal College of Art London in 1995.
Matthew Burrows MBE 