Matthew always painted but managed to distract himself with a few alternative careers. He’s worked as a lecturer, art-director & writer, with his first novel short-listed for the Vogel Literature Award.
He’s lived in Australia, Europe and Asia, including several months encamped beneath a grand piano. He’s spent nights under stars in India, under-ground in Bolivia, under surveillance in Burma and under-nourished in London. His scariest moment was having machine-gun shoved in his face during Nepalese anti-monarchy riots, although crashing a paraglider into a forest was also something of a highlight.
Featured in BRW as one of Australia’s top 50 artists, in the past few years Matthew’s won, or been a finalist for, 70 national juried art awards. He’s had 15 solo and more than 80 group shows.
In his series ‘Monumental Nobodies’, award-winning Australian artist Matthew Quick refers to the image of power, yet he reverses and distorts its meaning through a conceptual approach that reveals, with a gentle humour, pressing issues of society, unfolding a reality that often hides behind appearances.
The aura of emperors and gods is eliminated by adding ordinary objects to replace their crowns and thrones, turning them into powerless nobodies. By ridiculing them, he plays with their initial grand goal and allows us to take a refreshed look at existence. There are also references to individual freedom, social control and surveillance, the deceitful behaviour of rulers who intentionally fail to act as they speak.
The works of Matthew Quick are a reflection of a world where deification is no longer possible. Try as they might, leaders seeking as they once did to manipulate their image into becoming omniscient and omnipresent super-beings, now confront an educated, media savvy and sceptical audience who by default look see beyond the veil of illusion.
