BERKELEY, CA.- The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents MATRIX 256, the first solo museum exhibition by New York–based artist and designer Joseph Holtzman. The artist’s work draws on European painting and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century decorative arts, and often alludes to friends, family, historical figures, literary characters, and cultural personalities. This presentation will include ten of the artist’s oil paintings on marble or slate made during the past decade.

Best known as the founding publisher, editor, and designer of the fabled magazine Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors (1997–2004), Holtzman has since dedicated his talents to the practice of painting. Nest was unique and revered partly because Holtzman treated each new issue as a remarkable physical object of its own, incorporating shape and texture as well as a highly imaginative approach to pattern and color. This attention to the unique qualities of color and texture extends to his painted works. “I want to get in painting,” Holtzman said recently, “past the graphic image. It’s painting as a sculpture and as an object.”

Holtzman’s practice involves careful layering and scraping off of richly colored oil paint on slabs of heavy marble (his favorite surface) and slate. He exploits the transparency of the oil medium and the capacity of marble and other stone surfaces to absorb and reflect light, leading to remarkable chromatic and tonal effects. Nearly all of the works in this exhibition are portraits, though the characters and people depicted in them, including Holtzman’s mother Frieda, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, the composer Steven Sondheim, and the artist’s husband Carl Skoggard, among others, emerge to the artist as a consequence of his process rather than as an original inspiration. Further, characters are evoked less by bodily or facial elements than they are by related symbols and settings. For instance, in Frieda Holtzman, with the Phases of the Moon (2009) he conjures his mother through rich colors, images of spoons, vegetal forms, and other shapes presented in a style inspired by Hubert and Jan Van Eyck’s fifteenth-century Ghent Altarpiece.

From his embrace of unconventional processes and painting surfaces to his ability to draw from artistic references of the past while conveying experiences and characters personal to him, Holtzman has in a remarkably brief period of time created an exciting and formidable body of work.