"Paradigms: Matt Magee at Manneken Press" celebrates the continuum of Magee’s creative relationship with Manneken Press. The artist’s first project with Manneken Press began in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic made travelling from the his home in Phoenix to our studio impossible and necessitated a remote form of collaboration. Magee returned to Manneken Press in October of 2023, this time in person, to begin work on a second trio of prints.

The abstract, hard-edged forms found in the six prints produced at Manneken Press are seen throughout Magee’s oeuvre. His 2021 prints, "Plugs", "Bugs" and "Drugs", were conceived as an abstract poetic triptych that riffs on conceptual notions of language and iterative processes relating to stacking and sequencing. Working in his Scottsdale, AZ studio Magee drew the images directly onto copper plates, leaving space at the margins so formal information became centralized, focused and symbolic. The prints continued to develop over the subsequent months, with additional plate work and color proofing done by mail and via Facetime and telephone conversations.

The editions of "Plugs", "Bugs" and "Drugs" were released in June of 2021. The forms and their titles are suggestive but non-explicative.

The structures of 2024’s "Winter Pool" and "Mind Gap" were inspired by a small painting by Paul Klee titled “Mask”: a central oval form resting on a neck/base sprouts red-orange hair and is striated with orange and yellow lines which form the contours of a face. In Magee’s prints the frontality and flatness of the oval shapes relate to the head-like form in the Klee painting, but the central ovals are filled with a matrix of rectangles which activate the inner peripheries of the forms. The white of un-inked paper is an important aspect of these aquatints; this negative space forms the blocks in "Winter Pool", while "Mind Gap"’s blocks are positive, floating within the negative space. Magee transmutes Klee’s head shape into thought bubbles with udders – innately linguistic, though in an indecipherable language. "Lunar Lantern" references a trilobite, the marine arthropod commonly found as a fossil. Stacked slices create a structure that appears to be lit from within. The white of the un-inked paper also plays an important role here, creating the moon slices as negative space surrounded by the purple pigment. The print’s stacked and centered ancient forms create an object of ritual that holds space and light as it rises. The editions of "Mind Gap", "Winter Pool" and "Lunar Lantern" were released in March 2024.

"Plugs", "Bugs" and "Drugs" are aquatints hand-printed on Somerset Velvet Soft White paper in editions of 20. "Mind Gap", "Winter Pool" and "Lunar Lantern" are aquatints hand-printed on Rives BFK white paper in editions of 20. All of Matt Magee’s prints in the exhibition were produced at, published by and are available from Manneken Press.