Landon Metz

New York-based artist Landon Metz has garnered critical attention for his ability to imbue a spare language of abstraction with visual dynamism and sense of movement. His paintings have the capacity to expand and deal with space serially, while being site-responsive rather than site-specific. Metz’s painting practice is marked by a great sensitivity to site and scale and increasingly incorporates performance and sculptural approaches to activate the space. Strategies of display are central to Metz’s visual language and his installations often incorporate elements of rhythm and repetition. Multi-panel paintings are frequently presented in his work as diptychs and triptychs, which he sometimes installs abutting one another, reaching into or wrapping around corners. He also produces shaped canvases that mimic the abstract shapes that appear in his other paintings. As Metz has observed, “My work is largely about breaking down polarities, and I think that’s apparent in the way I present space. It’s about negotiating between setting and subject, public and private.” Metz’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions in Norway, Italy, Denmark and Canada. In 2014, he was the artist in residence at the ADN Collection in Bolzano, Italy. In 2018, Metz was the subject of a solo exhibition at Museo Pietro Canonica in Rome. Metz was recently featured in the group exhibition Blue, at The Nassau County Museum of Art in New York, and Greffes, curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto at Villa Medici in Rome. Metz was born in Phoenix, Arizona and currently lives and works in New York.

Landon has always created abstract and organic figures but, in his recent works, abstraction gives way to accents of figuration.

“For the past thirteen years, my practice has been a dedicated inquiry into what it means to be a painter today. Abstraction has served as my primary vehicle, not simply as a formal language but as a means of engaging with the ineffable—tracing presence through absence, form through formlessness, and intention through entropy. In recent years, I have felt a shift percolating in the work, leading me toward portraiture—a transition that feels at once radical and inevitable. This body of work is not a departure from my past but a culmination, a profound synthesis of the philosophy, materiality, and sensibility that have defined my practice. It represents a significant milestone in contemporary painting, pushing the medium forward while remaining deeply tethered to its history. There is a conceptual rigor and a universality here that transcends specific eras or movements, forming a new space where abstraction and figuration interact fluidly, existing in a state of dynamic tension. Rather than adhering strictly to any one tradition, my work synthesizes influences to create a dialogue between presence and absence, control and entropy. They are an extension of everything I have built—my commitment to interconnection, my reverence for material process, my embrace of chance and unpredictability—while simultaneously forging new ground in the exploration of self and the ineffible. They are not merely representations of a figure, but invocations of a shared human experience, conduits for something larger than the self.”

Landon Metz