Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing
Website: houseofseiko.info/Quintessa-Matranga
Quintessa Matranga was born in 1989 in New York. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2013. During her years in San Francisco, she worked as both an artist and a curator at Mission Comics, a gallery operating in the back room of a comic book shop. In that role she organized exhibitions, published a book of drawings with Publication Studio Oakland, and developed a committed community of practice in the Bay Area before relocating to New York. Her book, Drawings, was published by Publication Studio Oakland around 2015, and she subsequently published two artist books with the Zurich publisher Nieves: Toilet Paintings, collecting her celebrated series first exhibited at Freddy in Harris, New York, in May 2017, published by Nieves (Zurich), and Christmas in New York. Christmas in New York collected a new series of drawings made during the holiday season, reflecting on how the holidays, though filled with pretty decorations, are also fraught with dysfunctional family drama and social pressure to celebrate.
Matranga moved back to San Francisco in 2020 after spending a formative period working and exhibiting in New York. The artist’s return to her former homebase prompted a gradual reappraisal of her relationship to painting, as she was no longer contending with the self-set demands of operating in the crowded field of the New York art world and could begin to think more autonomously about what compelled her toward painting to begin with. Since her return, she has continued to exhibit internationally while developing new bodies of work in San Francisco.
Matranga has been the subject of solo exhibitions at What Pipeline, Detroit (2022, 2019), Sandy Brown, Berlin (2018), Freddy Harris (2017), and Queer Thoughts, New York (2017). Her work has appeared in major group exhibitions at venues including TOKAS, Tokyo (2020), Bureau, New York (2020), Carlos Ishikawa, London (2018), Karma International, Los Angeles (2017), Pilar Corrias, London (2017), and Et al., San Francisco (2016).
Matranga’s paintings elaborate a form of domestic surrealism in which decidedly mundane elements take on an existential significance. While she paints monsters, toilets, Christmas presents, spirits, houses, cars, people, trees, and snow, she draws on vernacular modes of expression — such as streetwear, comic books, childhood fairy tales, and cartoons. Her narrative, fantasy-like scenes are soft and strange. Her work hovers between providing a key to understand our current cultural moment and radically unhinging it; the world her practice brings into being is one populated by misfits, miscreants, and signifiers of the disillusioned.
Previously known for creating mostly conceptual paintings exploring humor and personal narrative content, Matranga’s works now reveal a painterly core and pictorial language that reflects her day-to-day life more than anything else. At the center of her latest paintings is a relaxed sense of making art as a part of everyday life — finding compelling, unexpected images in her daily activities that would be impossible to conceptualize cerebrally. One recurring focus has become two young men on the shore of the Russian River looking on as ducklings go about their business. Leisurely moments, both idealized and real, are held in tension with an almost brooding sense of concreteness and tactile reality; forms are depersonalized and abstracted, specificity is blurred, and what emerges is a more open-ended pictorial experience.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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