Canadian Matthew Wong rose to the pinnacle of the art world during his short career, a mere six years from 2013, when he began painting and drawing in earnest, and his death by suicide in 2019 at the age of 35.
© 2023 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“In that time, he created a visual language uniquely his own, becoming known for vibrant and psychologically charged landscape paintings in a wide range of styles,” says the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, where a retrospective on Wong’s work runs to Feb. 14.
The Toronto-born artist’s landscapes are praised for evoking the spirit of Post-Impressionist painters like Vincent van Gogh. With his signature style, Wong synthesized forms, bold colours, and mystical themes, creating rich, evocative scenes, some of them full of melancholy and yearning.
Wong’s first solo exhibition in New York in March, 2018, included seven medium-size to large-scale paintings depicting forests, glens, and groves, mostly in vibrant Fauvist colors. The Kingdom, above (2017, oil on canvas, 48 by 72″) was among them and was at the centre of intense attention by collectors.
Wong left some 1,000 paintings and ink drawings, most of which are now fiercely fought for by collectors. He was a prolific painter, and frequently reused canvases, executing new images on top of earlier ones.
After Wong took his life, the New York Times proclaimed him “one of the most talented painters of his generation.”
Raffi Khatchadourian, staff writer at The New Yorker, writes that since Wong’s death, “the art market has been in a frenzy over his work, with prices escalating to multiple millions, and the rabid auctioneering has helped to shape his story into the caricature of a brilliant but tortured outsider, another Basquiat, another van Gogh”
Wong dealt with depression, Tourette’s syndrome, and autism. Most of his relationships were done only through social media. He was not even known to most of the tenants at the building where he had his studio, in an industrial neighbourhood in Edmonton.
Asked in an interview in November, 2018 with artchoice magazine about the “hints of melancholy” in his work, Wong said:
“Living a fairly reclusive life and finding the most stimulation and enjoyment from matters of the mind, be they following the natural path of my imagination or watching films in the dark of my living room, an activity which is a part of my routine I pursue every night without fail, it’s inevitable that the solitary nature of this pattern seeps into and informs my work.
The Realm of Appearances” exhibition at Boston Museum of Fine Arts, here.
The Matthew Wong Foundation, here.
The artchoice magazine interview with Matthew Wong, here.
Matthew Wong’s work at Karma gallery in New York,
Matthew Wong’s obituary, here.
NOTE: Matthew Wong | Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort will be on view at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from Mar. 1 to Sept. 1, 2024. It will explore the connections between Wong’s work and that of Van Gogh, whose art inspired Wong.
Image at the top of the post: Matthew Wong, The Realm of Appearances, 2018 .Oil on canvas. Private Collection. © 2023 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
This is #56 in the series 150 Artists, an ongoing series on Canadian artists you should know.
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Matthew Wong’s work was/is beautiful. I very much enjoyed this post. Thank you.
His work was indeed exceptional and I particularly enjoyed researching him because I only vaguely knew of his work. He’s such an interesting story. Thank you.