Matt Rebholz

Matt Rebholz is an artist, graphic novelist, and educator from Austin, TX where he is a member of the ICOSA Collective. He received a BFA with a concentration in Drawing and Printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000 and an MFA with a concentration in Printmaking from the University of Texas, Austin in 2008.

The spaces depicted in Matt Rebholz’s current body of landscape paintings are informed by film stills from Western, Fantasy, and Science Fiction films. These environments have been denuded of all evidence of life, leaving rocky and alien landscapes rendered in an electrified, saturated palette.

Rebholz engages with film as a coping strategy to manage a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder. Genre movies like those referenced in the paintings represent a comfortable space of retreat and an emotional scaffold in times of crisis. Like bipolar disorder itself, the landscapes that have been built around these films are simultaneously lonesome and populous, quiet and loud, barren and fertile.