Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Collage, collections, publications
Website: mattborruso.org
Matt Borruso is a visual artist and bibliophile born and raised in San Francisco. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002 and his MFA from Yale University in 2004. He has lived and worked in San Francisco throughout his career. He publishes artist books under his imprint Visible Publications, and his publications are held in the library collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the International Center for Photography. He has taught at Stanford University.
Borruso’s practice centers on collecting, organizing, and transforming found images — photographs, graphics, magazines, posters, postcards, and books — into collages and publications. His working method is accumulative and associative: images are gathered, studied, moved around in piles, and arranged on large steel sheets with magnets, rearranged over weeks or months until they seem complete, then photographed and taken apart. The resulting works exist as both arrangements and records of arrangements. Categories emerge and dissolve, images generating new meanings through proximity and juxtaposition — not through fixed intention but through sustained attention.
His interests are encyclopedic and promiscuous: hands and gloves, religious statuary, ikebana, Hieronymus Bosch, punk flyers, Disneyland, ape masks, Brutalist architecture, Carlsbad Caverns, and Heavy Metal magazine coexist across his collections with equal weight. The pre-digital, degraded, and rephotographed image is a recurring formal concern, as is the relationship between looking as a private ritual and display as a social act. His artist books extend this logic into print, producing new images and objects from found materials through a different, more durational process.
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