Matt Crookshank

www.mattcrookshank.com

Biography 2006

Matt Crookshank is a painter and a video artist who has been exhibiting regularly for 8 years. His practice bleeds from digital to painting, blending each practice and sharing ideas and techniques throughout.  He is represented by le. in Toronto, and SKEW, in Calgary. His work has been written about nationally in The Calgary Harold, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star, and in all of Toronto’s major weeklies (Now Magazine, Xtra, and Eye Weekly).  For 6 years, Matt was the curator and director of the groundbreaking Toronto Gallery, sis boom bah (www.sisboombah.ca).  Opened in what was to become Toronto’s leading contemporary art district on Queen St. W., Matt used the Sis Boom Bah vehicle to grow a community of like minded artists which became an integral part of this dynamic neighbourhood.  After six years as both artist and gallery director, Matt closed the gallery to focus on the demands of his growing painting career.  With national representation in Canada, and recent exhibitions in New York, London, and Miami, Matt Crookshank continues to create challenging abstractions that electrify and redefine the genre.

‘Crookshank is like a benign Dr. Frankenstein, piecing together paintings from many ideas, creating scarred abstractions that are monstrous in their beauty.’

-Travis Reynolds, The Calgary Harold/Swerve Magazine, May 2^nd, 2006

'Crookshank's flamboyant, happy disasters demonstrate by contrast how bland and predictable most contemporary abstraction has become.'
-RM Vaughan, The National Post, March 5th, 2005