Opening: November 21, from 6 - 8 pm
Exhibition dates: November 22, 2025 - January 6, 2026
Opening times: Mon-Sat, from 11 am - 7 pm
Address: Taymour Grahne Projects, Warehouse 31A, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, UAE
Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present 'The Sun Years’, a solo show by NY based artist Matthew F Fisher, opening at Taymour Grahne Projects in Dubai on November 21, from 6 to 8 pm.
Manhattan-based artist Matthew F Fisher is a painter of thresholds. His canvases linger, betwixt and between transient moments. The curl of a wave, caught just before crashing, the moon rising as daylight fades, a conch shell sitting quietly on the beach amplifying a far-off history. In Fisher’s exhibition The Sun Years at Taymour Grahne Projects, these moments coalesce into a new body of work that is both intimate and expansive, fixed in personal experience and replete with universal symbolism.
Since graduating in 2000, Fisher has lived and worked in New York City (apart from a three-year spell in LA). His studio is subterranean, a corner of his apartment building’s basement. Here, standing at the wall, he paints seas, beaches, birds, shells, skies, mountain peaks and all-seeing moons. Finished canvases stack up until they leave for various exhibitions, meaning Matthew often encounters his works together only when they’re on gallery walls. ‘It’s only when I walk into the show for the first time,’ he reflects, ‘that I get to see all of the works hanging together and I fully understand what I’ve made.’
This sense of revelation, of piecing together fragments into a whole, underpins The Sun Years. Fisher presents natural phenomena as crisp, flattened forms and here, we renew our acquaintance with his acclaimed stylised seascapes, the characteristic shells and clouds and horizons that have captivated him, in varying permutations and relationships, for years. And, in this new exhibition we fly through big fluffy clouds too, leaving the beaches and seascapes far below as Fisher’s brush takes us soaring into the skies.
Here, in A Share of the Sky and Montagne (Mountain) we encounter mountain peaks in Matthew’s imagery for the first time. Inspired by Marsden Hartley’s Modernist mountain paintings, Fisher renders lofty peaks as massive, monumental forms, hovering imperiously above the cloud line, simultaneously grounded and weightless.
‘So natural is this image, that it feels surreal,’ he remarks. Mountains, in Fisher’s hands, become a counterpoint to seas: static rather than mutable, vertical rather than horizontal, enduring rather than ever-changing. In juxtaposing the two, the artist relishes creating a sort of dialogue. ‘Mountains are, in a funny way the opposite of the seas,’ he says. ‘And I like doing the opposite from time to time’.
Though Fisher’s iconography, from mountain peaks to shells might appear minimalistic, his work is the product of years of refinement. Early in his career he painted naturalistic scenes in exhaustive detail, until a lightbulb moment led the artist to considering ‘nothing’ paradoxically as ‘everything.’ In stripping away extraneous detail, in sloughing away the visual fat, if you like, he found his voice. Images hover between representation and symbolism, reality and icon, naturalism and Pop. His paintings are not records of what the world looks like but meditations on what it feels like, distilled into clear, resonant forms.
A terse energy comes from these juxtapositions of forms, of the ‘real’ and the surreal. Several works in the exhibition eschew the horizontal, literally, by mobile ripples of water across the entire canvas, unbound by top or bottom edge. Our gaze locks onto the waterline then, as while walking the shoreline and watching waves lap at your feet, you look down to the twinkling crystalline sand. You might meet the occasional bird here, as in The Space In Between, which features Fisher’s neat, flattened perspective, with birds painted as though glimpsed in the near distance. Fisher calls this dislocated visual register ‘memory space’; a levelled field that nonetheless suggests infinite depth.
‘The sea has always beguiled me,’ Fisher says. ‘The mystery. The unknown. The constant change. It’s 24/7/365. A reminder that we can’t control the waves, and they will go on long after we are gone.’
This fascination animates his wave paintings, tapping into a more existential view of oceans as infinitely magical such as in The Art of History, which captures the precise tipping point before a crescendo of water collapses into foam. Matthew emphasises this precarious energy through his process: the cresting spray is created by physically flinging paint across the canvas, a gesture of controlled chance that enlivens the otherwise diagrammatic wave. The result is a paradox: frozen chunks of time infused with perpetual motion, permanence holding transience in suspension.
Other symbols weave through Fisher’s lexicon, carrying layers of personal resonance. The moon, often depicted with a human face, first appeared in his canon around 2015 when he and his partner were expecting their first child. ‘I saw the image as a metaphor for the baby in utero: a human within a circle,’ he explains. Over the years, the moon’s face has grown more detailed, accumulating seas and mountains of its own, echoing the way we project stories and features onto that cheesy lunar surface. For Fisher, the ‘man in the moon’ has always been his son – an infinite link between artist, man and child, lassoed far over the distant, benevolent moon.
Shells are another recurring motif, objects that hold a particular poetic charge for Fisher. Empty of their original inhabitants, shells are relics - discovered, treasured, listened to, traded, or simply left to glisten on the shore. In Fisher’s paintings, they act as conduits of memory, amplifiers of inner time, reminders of cycles completed and renewed. Asked to elaborate on their presence in his works, the artist cites a lyric by British band The Clientele: ‘Like the sea inside a shell, everything speaks to itself.’ Fisher describes shells as ‘physical calendars, objects that have marked time. A sundial. Which is exemplified in The Passive Voice. Not only are the shells a history of growth – time – but their shadows come out towards us.’
The Passive Voice is a key work in this exhibition, as it unites several significant themes at the heart of Fisher’s work. Here, two shells sit beneath a smiling moon whose light divides the sea. The temporal element Fisher alludes to is seen here in the shadows extending toward the viewer, an effect inspired by Giorgio de Chirico’s early metaphysical painting The Enigma of a Day, from early 1914. Fisher especially notes how this trick of Chirico’s made the moon ‘feel that much brighter’.
This clever compositional device also binds the image together, connecting the foreground to the distant horizon. ‘The moon and earth, the moon and the sun, the sea and shells, the sea and land - this is a painting about connections and interactions,’ Fisher explains. It is also a painting about harmony: light and dark, symmetry and asymmetry, intimacy and vastness’.
Texture plays an equally important role in the artist’s vocabulary. While his suns, moons, and waves appear iconographic, reduced to elemental clarity, his beaches are painted with painstaking density, into surfaces so convincingly granular that viewers (including this writer) often initially mistake them for real sand. ‘Like the sand on a beach, my painted sand is built up from tens of thousands of individual marks,’ he says. ‘It’s a way to activate the ground, the tabletop on which the still life rests.’
At its heart, The Sun Years is a meditation on time. Waves crest and crash, shells trace the growth of vanished lives, shadows stretch across beaches, suns rise and set. Fisher’s paintings freeze these cycles while acknowledging their inevitability. They remind us that the sea will continue long after we are gone, the mountains too. The moons waxes and wanes impassively, relentlessly, above our lives. Yet within these vast rhythms, Matthew finds humanity and intimacy: the face of a child in a moon, the trace of a hand in a shell, the texture of sand beneath our feet.
The Sun Years gathers these meditations into a luminous whole, representing Fisher’s expansive explorations of the natural world and its manifold metaphorical power. Together, they remind us that in the endless cycles of light and tide, we might find our own reflections. Fleeting, fragile - and profoundly human.
Matthew F Fisher (b. 1976) is an artist from Boston, MA currently living and working in NYC. His works are included in major public and corporate collections, such as the New York City Department of Education - Public Art for Public Schools, Fidelity Investments, Boston, MA; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA and Dogfish Brewery, Milton, DE collections. He has shown nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA; SHRINE, New York, NY; Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK; Johansson Projects, Oakland, CA; Over Under Room, Brooklyn, NY; and Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York, NY among others. He is a recipient of the Pollock Kranser Foundation grant, the painting fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a full fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Matthew received a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design (1998) and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (2000). He has completed one artist residency in Pasaquan, Buena Vista, GA and two in Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. He also participated at the Millay Colony for the Arts taking place in Austerlitz, NY.