Matthew Hindley

Matthew Hindley is a South African artist born in Cape Town who lives and works between Cape Town and Berlin.

Artistic Practice

Matthew Hindley has refused to be pinned down to any one mode of production. After graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 2002, Hindley has practised the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk – exploring painting, sculpture, drawing, video and physical computing.

Professional Career

Overview of Development

In 1996, the fourth year of his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, Hindley abandoned his studies owing to a conflict of interest - a conflict only resolved in 2002 when Hindley returned to the University of Cape Town to complete his BA FA. He embarked on a career in information technology as the co-owner of Blades Media - a pioneering web development company in the very early days of the internet. Hindley remained largely absorbed in this for four years, during which Blades Media won a number of awards, and had major clients, including Vodacom and Murray and Roberts.

In 2001, however, a video project that Hindley had been working on - Allow Me to Observe - had its world premier the World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam. The work consisted of a Galvanic Skin Response monitor built into a microcircuit board, digital video camera, spy camera and microphone, microcomputer programmed with C++, ECG pads, bag, and a sweatband. The POV camera would only record when the wearer became excited, or experienced extreme emotional states. The premier of this project launched Hindley back onto the art scene; the work has remained influential as a thematic that predecessor to later ideas in his paintings.

Allow Me to Observe and another similarly technologically advanced project Infra Red were exhibited both locally and internationally in 2003, including at the Michaelis Gallery in Cape Town, in Johannesburg and Berlin. The work was a nominee for MTN New Contemporaries which showed at Museumafrica, Johannesburg. In the same year Hindley won a permanent public art installation competition at the Iziko South African National Gallery for the proposal Speak Naturally and Continuously (SNAC). SNAC translates conversation and sounds from the Company Gardens into text. This translation is achieved with very sensitive outdoor microphones, microwave transmitters and speech-to-text translation software. The translated text runs across an LED screen that spans the entrance to the gallery. 2005 saw the installation of Speak Naturally and Continuously, unfortunately a project that has been dogged with difficulties ever since. The ambition of the idea was at odds with the extreme outdoor conditions and technological and budgetary limitations.

In 2006, Hindley had a painting solo at 34LONG in Cape Town, a show which was very successful and favourably received. The following year, Hindley was invited to live in Berlin for three months by German collectors he had met in 2005 and who had become followers of his paintings and drawings. In those three months, Hindley worked on painting towards a private show. Hindley returned to Berlin for some months in 2008 in order to continue painting and researching the international art world.

Berlin had an enormous impact on Hindley's artistic practice in that he returned, almost exclusively, to figurative painting in oils on canvas. In this body of work Hindley responds to the influence of his time spent in Berlin, taking on the monumental scale of the German master Adolf von Menzel. The scenes depicted take on a cinematographic feel – Hindley composes the work first photographically, with specific lighting arrangements, before adding props or animals and then finally rendering in paint. Characters are recognisable from painting to painting, brought to life on his large-format work-surfaces to face different enigmas in each composition. Hindley’s paintings are simultaneously unsettling and comforting – disturbing in the sense that his characters reveal a nuanced darkness and reassuring for the fact that it is a very human darkness to which each of us can relate.

In 2009 Hindley began being exclusively represented by iArt Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa.

Solo Exhibitions

2007 Private Vernissage, Berlin, Germany, with Kromschroeder & Pfannenschmidt

2006 Before My Time, 34LONG, Cape Town

2005 Speak Naturally & Continuously, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town / Abolute Chop, ( Art-Directed by Zwelethu Mthethwa ), Mzoli’s Butchery and Grill, Gugulethu

2004 Untitled, Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn / Surrender, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town

2003 Infra-Red, The Michaelis Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

Quotes

From : Miles Keylock in 'Art Pick of the Week', Mail and Guardian, Autumn 2008

"Ironically the best works are on show are those by Matthew Hindley and Lisa Brice, who resurrect some of modernism’s most primal sins in their clever conceptual clarity and narrative depth."

From : 'Matt Hindley at 34LONG' by Lloyd Pollack, Artthrob and Cape Times, 2006

"Hindley's prancing cadavers, skeletons, saints and spectres form a rollicking Coney island of the afterlife, a Disneyland orchestrated by the Grim Reaper and Old Nick. His metaphysical slapstick liberates us from the repressive clasp of conventional religion, and provides a revised gospel that affirms human freedom and autonomy. Funky visual contrivances and an exhilarating sense of fun bring a welcome blast of fresh air to our art environment which so often degenerates into the dour issue-driven solemnity that prevailed at Michael Stevenson's survey 'South African Art Now'. The painter mercifully avoids this deadly seriousness, repudiates all socio-political concerns, and remembers that the artist's first duty is to construct compelling imagery. Matthew Hindley honours this rule and delivers such spellbinding visual delight that one can only applaud him as one of the country's most captivating and original young talents."

From : MATTHEW HINDLEY: Artthrob ArtBio by Andrew Lamprecht (September, 2004)

"From the work that brought him overnight success, Allow me to Observe, to his most recent solo show, Surrender, Matthew Hindley seems to be obsessed with the things that we cannot control. From that early work which chronicled the involuntary levels of excitement of its subjects, through to the large sculpture that dominates his latest exhibition displaying a 'cute' loss of bodily control, and with many works exploring the inner world of his subconscious, Hindley has managed to use technology as well as traditional media to tell us very sad stories with a wonderful sense of wit, self-doubt and exquisite artistic sense. For a while considered primarily a new media artist, being one of the earliest practitioners of the now up-and-coming area of physical computing, Hindley has steadfastly maintained his right to work in traditional media, such as drawing, despite some earlier objections to this form from critics, gallerists and even friends. That Hindley was right in doing so is evidenced by the critical success of his recent forays into the realms of painting and sculpture.

Hindley has never limited himself; feeling free to work in fashion, video or whatever else works, in effecting his own brand strategy. Deeply interested in the cult of celebrity, and especially how celebrity comes to haunt those who are celebrated, he uses images taken from trash media as well as internet spam to programme sad but moving works about the famous. Moving from such external functions he now seems to have found a more interesting subject matter: the psychopathology of everyday life. "

From : Tracy Murinik in 'Bright Young Things', Art South Africa, Autumn 2003

"Living parallel to his more public presentations, and inhabiting his sketchbooks, are two-dimensional innovations that reveal another lifeform to Hindley's production. The figures in these decidedly wonderful aci-fi/techno-fantasy/otherworldly drawings, with a Japanese-meets-extraterrestrial edge to their rendering, appear, literally, wired or ominously possessed but oddly gentle all the same. It's a slightly scary but very beautiful universe."

"Central to both his two-dimensional work and his clandestine, larger than life sculpture..."is a focus on how individuals encounter and engage their environments: the ways in which they choose to act, believe, respond, or not “knowingly or unknowingly”; through conscious decision-making or when caught randomly in unknown or unanticipated systems."

From : Paul Edmunds, reviewing Cold Room solo show, Artthrob, November 2002

"I feel attracted to his 'boy with a chemistry set' approach and I'm interested in the way he harnesses functional objects and processes, not without a sinister edge, to create situations which are thought-provoking and evocative."

External Links

General Information and Images

• Matthew Hindley's Official Site
• Website of Matthew Hindley's primary gallery, iArt Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

• Artbio, an overview of Hindley's work by Andrew Lamprecht
• Matthew Hindley: Artist on the Cusp, an interview
• Matthew Hindley at the Cold Room, a review