Matthew Kirk

We are pleased to present Skinnin’ the Game, the first solo exhibition by Matthew Kirk (b. 1978, Ganado, Arizona) since he joined the gallery’s roster in 2025. The New York-based artist presents three bodies of work, including new paintings, sculptures and a collaborative installation.

Kirk, who is of Diné (Navajo) and European descent, is known for his mixed-media work inspired by his urban environment as well as Diné motifs found in textiles. In 2024, Kirk was a featured artist in the Brooklyn Museum’s The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition and in 2025, his work was included in the Hudson River Museum’s Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time, a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Kirk’s work is in the collection of the Forge Project in Taghkanic, New York, among others. 

A self-taught artist, Kirk employs a wide range of media and techniques. His innovative use of non-traditional materials includes building supplies—Sheetrock, plywood, insulation foam and roofing paper. Kirk favors these materials because of their ubiquity and ready-made qualities, which allow him to work more efficiently in the studio. They are also familiar to him. After settling in New York in 2006, Kirk supported himself as an art handler for almost a decade. It was a job that suited him, not only because of its proximity to the art world but also because it indulged his passion for building things.

Kirk’s pragmatism is part of a holistic approach to resources—an economy of materials, energy and time. It informs even his choice of paint colors, which he uses straight from the tube instead of mixing different hues to create something new. In the studio, he avoids waste so rigorously that bits of discarded wood, metal, feathers or objects collected off the street will, years later, find their way into his work. This ethos echoes the nose-to-tail hunting and consumption practices found in many Indigenous communities, which use every part of an animal out of respect for both the animal and the environment.  

Practicality, however, is not the whole story. Kirk sees potential in these materials and he’s at his most creative when finding new ways to repurpose them. He has respect for the creators of these humble building supplies and for the labor and ingenuity that brought them into existence. From his colorful mixed-media assemblages to his painterly compositions replete with distinctive motifs, Kirk uses these materials to create work that evokes memories of his childhood, daily life and time spent with his children. His paintings and sculptures are reflections of how he sees himself and the world around him. Through this aesthetic language, Kirk explores the intersection of his Indigenous and Euro-American heritage and positions himself in respect to both.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

On view are colorful abstract paintings on Sheetrock articulated in Kirk’s distinctive style of mark-making. Swirling configurations of brushstrokes uniformly distributed across the surface vibrate with rhythm and energy. Kirk’s approach is largely intuitive but he’s careful to strike a balance between areas of dense gestural marks and forms that are slightly more defined—a dog, an eye, a shadowy figure—creating moments of recognition that invite a closer look. He paints directly on the Sheetrock, without gesso, so the board’s inherent tones—ivory, gray, green or blue, each indicating a specific commercial application, from moisture-proofing to fire-proofing—remain visible, functioning as a softly hued backdrop to his dynamic compositions.

The exhibition also includes a diverse range of mixed-media sculptures, including subtly figurative assemblages fashioned from disparate objects such as basketball hoops, arrows, tires and drop cloths. Kirk affectionately refers to these works as “studio mates” because he lives with them until he accumulates, often serendipitously, the found materials he needs to complete them, a process that can take years. 

Kirk also presents a three-sided bench created in collaboration with Ben Erikson, a Brooklyn-based furniture designer who crafts one-of-a-kind commissioned pieces. A nod to Donald Judd’s Double Back Bench, 1981, the artists fabricated this bench from one of Kirk's paintings on plywood, which Erikson deconstructed and reconfigured. Installed in the center of the gallery, viewers are invited to sit, pause and take in the exhibition.

A series of sculptural paintings, three-dimensional constructions comprising numerous individual motifs configured on what Kirk calls “tiles,” completes the exhibition. Similar to his Sheetrock paintings, the artist’s non-narrative vocabulary represents a pictorial language of elemental signs—a mindscape drawn from his life experience. Kirk uses vivid color, but he also exercises restraint in some areas by applying the paint in thin coats to allow the organic texture of the tile’s wooden substrate to show through. Occasionally, he integrates tiles of different materials, including roofing paper and Coroplast, to introduce another layer of visual interest.

ABOUT MATTHEW KIRK

Matthew Kirk was born in Ganado, Arizona in 1978 and grew up in Wisconsin. In 2006, he moved to Queens, New York, where he lives and works today. 

Kirk has exhibited his work extensively since 2003. In 2021, a large painting was on view at NADA House on Governors Island in New York Harbor, in an exhibition organized by the New Art Dealers Alliance and singled out by Roberta Smith in her review of the show in The New York Times. In 2022, two large works, one twenty-two feet long, were prominently hung in the lobby of Meta’s Midtown Manhattan office in the historic James A. Farley Building and his work was included in Outcropping: Indigenous Art Now at the Southampton Arts Center, New York. In 2023, Kirk’s work was on view in the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York, in Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969 and in The House Edge, an exhibition addressing Indigenous sovereignty at The 8th Floor, New York, presented by the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. In 2024, his work was included in Hudson Valley Artists 2024: Bibliography at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York, New Paltz; and on view in the Brooklyn Museum in The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition. In 2025, his work was included in the Hudson River Museum’s Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time and Kirk had commissioned work on view at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University, Georgia.

Kirk was a 2019 recipient of the Eiteljorg Museum Fellowship for Contemporary Native American Art. His work is in the Forge Project collection in Taghkanic, New York; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; and the Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis.