The Mercedes Matter gallery exhibition falls under the Arts at Baruch category. It took place on 11/3/09 from 1:00-2:00pm at the Sidney Mishkin building on 135 East 22nd street. This workshop consisted of a brief gallery tour of the art works of Mercedes Matter, from her early compositions to her later works in life. Matter was an artist who used bold colors in her paintings to attract viewers. She was especially drawn towards still-life, 2-D paintings of ordinary, every-day objects, such as fruits on a table. Matter used a lot of triangles in her artwork to hold everything together. For example, in her painting of a table with fruits, to keep the fruits from looking like they were about to fall off the table, she used triangles in between the plates to make it seem like nothing would fall off the table even though the angle of the table top was skewed.
The workshop didn’t take me out of my comfort zone. The gallery had a generally nice atmosphere and it felt like walking into a section of a museum, although it was rather small. Most or all of the artwork exhibited was borrowed from Matter’s son and the owners of her works. Mercedes Matter used a lot of abstract shapes in her art, which made it hard to understand what she was trying to depict. Her artwork is very subjective and at first glance a couple of her paintings looked like a young child’s scribbles. It took a while of staring at her work to figure out where the table legs in a painting was located, and to me that is not a good sign. There was one painting that I liked by Matter called “Seated Nude” because of the nice light colors she mixed, but overall I wouldn’t recommend this workshop to people unless they can appreciate abstract, bold art.