By Matt Straub
Located in Detroit, MI
Matt Straub’s art is in the style of Pop-Art. He states that he seeks visual complexity, juxtaposing images of American icons, consumer goods, typography, cartoons and lists of words. “The work is a mash-up of sensibilities formed in my early punk and street art days.” “KA-POW” is a painting from his Pop Westerns series that feature classic Western iconographic images of cowboys, cowgirls, guns and horses. And though the narrative of guns is an extraordinarily hot topic in 21st century culture, his work shows the dark underside of the Old West, which, he states, was always a violent and lawless place.
“KA-POW!” depicts a violent narrative juxtaposed by the sentimental mythologies of the American West – melancholy sunsets, badlands, gunfights, outlaws and red-blooded heroes. He also references Hollywood Westerns and the bold visual vocabulary of the comics and plups of the 1930’s – 1950’s. He explains that as a kid he hitch-hiked across most of the West hopping freight trains for travel and living rough. In bold intense color, dynamic visuals and words that scream off the canvas, he considers his work an examination of a dark side of the American psyche and “metaphors for a vanishing West. My Pop-Westerns are like graffiti splattered boxcars rolling across the plains.”
A New York gallery that exhibited Straub’s work places...
Category
2010s Pop Art Matt Straub Figurative Paintings