Matthew Brandt was born in Los Angeles in 1982. His father is a California-based advertising photographer. He worked with his father as a photo-assistant in his early adolescence. As a young man, Brandt briefly abandoned photography turning to painting. While studying at Cooper Union in New York he fully embraced photography as his medium of choice. Following college, Brandt worked for two years for architectural photographer Robert Polidori. Matthew took snapshots of various lakes and reservoirs in California and soaked them in water from each corresponding location. The results are pretty random and, in my opinion, all beautiful. What he ends up with are sort of “personalized” portraits of these lakes and reservoirs.
Whether soaking prints in water from the subject lake, or printing on paper that the artist made from the subject tree, or even using a pigment that the artist created from the subject (charcoal from the trees, gum-bichromate emulsion of honeybees), Brandt blurs the line between the photograph and the photographed.
In December 2011, Forbes named Matthew Brandt one of tomorrow’s “brightest stars” in the article 30 Under 30: Art & Design. Art And Auction named him one of “The Next Most Collectible Artists” in June 2013. Brandt’s multi-media photographic work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Armand Hammer Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He received his BFA from Cooper Union and his MFA from UCLA. The artist currently lives and works in Los Angeles.