Matthew Picton and the paper sculpture

Hiroshima 1930 (2008)

Contemporary artist Matthew Picton  is a professional artist since 1998 and has exhibited widely on the West coast of the United States and in numerous art fairs.He working with maps.
His work seeks to address the evolution of civilization by re-creating the aesthetic and historical changes of the developing city, and his latest show at Sumarria Lunn provides a skewed take on the exponential growth of cities and the meaning of documentation. 

Dallas november 22 1963 (2011)

The paper sculptures of Hiroshima and Washinton DC reverse the approach of the urban infrastructure sculptures.  These works concentrate on the  the spaces in between the street lines, the lived in sites. Creating a sort of stripped down abstract architecture, the urban form presented as an idealized and utopian type of not architecture.


The empty forms of the pure white spaces avoid associations with memory, carrying no trace of the past, just empty vessels that can contain the imagination of memory. a sort of not architecture.

Las Vegas 1972 (2011)

Hiroshima can in many ways be seen as a memorial to the citizens who inhabited and lived within it’s spaces before the catastrophic annihilation occured. The non space of the abstracted architecture, the empty container seems like an appropriate means to commemorate the lives that were once lived within those spaces.

Washington DC

Then he created an aerial view of Dallas with film stills that show JFK's route the day he was assassinated and and other sites such as Jerusalem, created from The New Testament, The Torah, The Armenian Bible and The Koran,The 1854 London Cholera epidemic created from the book covers of “The Plague Years” by Daniel Defoe, Lower Manhattan, created from headlines that accompanied the 2001 world Trade center bombing and DVD covers of the film “Towering Inferno” also book covers of the novel “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth,  Las Vegas created from texts from Hunter S Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” luminescent paint and Hollywood has been inspired by the film Earthquake and the documentary Killer Quake. He used the covers of both films for building his piece. The map can be read as a cartography of the effects of imaginary and future earthquakes affecting Los Angeles.




The next exhibition "Urban Narratives" can be seen at Sumarria Lunn Gallery London from 8 March until 6 April.