Matthew Couper, Over, Over, Over, Over, Over & Over, 2011 - 2020, performance, video

To compliment his painting practice, Couper often develops performances to focus on the process of painting. His interest in the time-based presentation helps explain some of the mysteries of the process while sometimes obfuscating aspects of it by incorporating inconsistences of gesture, destruction and human error in the genesis of work. A development of art history has been protrayed by a painting monkey, a rock-incising caveman, a Pictish wode body decorator, a Jackson Pollock-type action drip painter and a printmaking vampire.

Over, Over, Over, Over, Over & Over presents a masked Nosferatu vampire, a copyright-skirting version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, as an art producer. A relationship lies in the simulacram of the vampire - a creature that is undead, a copy of its former self and casts no mirror reflection - similar to a print, where the finished image is a refection of the printing plate, reversed. The masked artist prepares a work station on the ground and proceeds to hand-burnish the prints and assesses the quality of the image as he works his way through the lengthy edition. This interation was performed at Sydney Contemporary Art Fair at Carriageworks, Australia in 2015.

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Matthew Couper (b. 1976, Aotearoa / New Zealand, lives and works in the USA)

Couper’s art uses aspects of western art history, starting at the internationalization of the Baroque movement. He uses established narratives to discuss the space between religion, politics survival and environmental issues.

Art critic John Seed referred to Couper as an "artist with a Kafkaesque view of the world".

Couper is represented by La Luz De Jesus Gallery, LA and Room Artspace, NYC; galerie gimpel+muller, Paris and PAULNACHE, Aotearoa/New Zealand

www.mattcouper.com