William Ruller’s atmospheric abstraction balances architecture, erosion, and memory through restrained geometry and layered surface. Drifting between landscape and interior space, the work carries a quiet tension—where stains, voids, and softened edges suggest both psychological terrain and traces of time. Ruller’s paintings reward sustained looking, revealing subtle shifts between structure and dissolution.
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Matney Gallery Returns to Artsy with Renewed Focus on Contemporary Voices and Institutional Dialogue
Williamsburg-based Matney Gallery has returned to Artsy with a renewed emphasis on artists whose work bridges contemporary culture, regional identity, museum dialogue, and long-term collecting. The relaunch reflects the gallery’s evolving mission: presenting artists whose practices resonate both within community spaces and in broader institutional conversations surrounding American art, photography, printmaking, and contemporary figuration.
The return also marks an opportunity to expand visibility for a number of artists who have become central to the gallery’s curatorial direction over the past several years.
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Rebecca Shkeyrov’s new paintings continue to expand a deeply personal visual language shaped by symbolism, memory, and shifting emotional states. Drawing from intuitive image-making, psychological space, and recurring archetypal forms, her work merges luminous color with fragmented structures that feel suspended between dream, autobiography, and invented mythology. Recent writing on her practice describes the paintings as “visual poems or psychological maps,” where identity and memory remain fluid rather than fixed.
Explore new work by Rebecca Shkeyrov through Matney Gallery on Artsy
Olga Tobreluts’s works from the late 1990s helped define the emergence of digital and media art in post-Soviet Russia. Associated with the Neo-Academism movement in St. Petersburg, Tobreluts combined classical mythology, fashion imagery, computer graphics, and photography into a new visual language that collapsed distinctions between antiquity and contemporary media culture. Her 1998 projects and related works entered international conversations around technology, identity, and representation, leading to exhibitions connected with the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other major institutions.
Across photography, lenticular works, painting, and digital collage, Tobreluts continues to create images that feel simultaneously futuristic and archetypal—merging references to Renaissance painting, club culture, cinema, and classical beauty with the fractured visual language of the digital age. Her practice remains central to discussions surrounding Russian contemporary art, media experimentation, and the transformation of figurative imagery in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
View works by Olga Tobreluts at Matney Gallery and on Matney Gallery’s Artsy page
Among the featured artists is photographer and curator John Lee Matney, whose photographic practice emerged from the experimental cultural environment of Athens, Georgia during the 1980s and 1990s. Matney’s work often explores memory, music culture, southern identity, and the emotional texture of overlooked moments. His photographs exist in conversation with independent film, documentary traditions, and contemporary narrative photography, while also informing the gallery’s broader curatorial vision.
Steve Prince’s Sow, Guard My Heart, and Hallelujah Anyhow stand at the center of his ongoing exploration of ancestry, faith, protection, and collective memory through the language of printmaking. In Sow, Prince honors generations of Black women whose labor, wisdom, and spiritual resilience become monumental acts of cultural preservation. The sweeping vertical composition transforms familial memory into something both intimate and epic, rooted in Southern storytelling and the traditions of communal care. Guard My Heart, one of Prince’s newer works, extends these themes through a spiritually charged figure whose enlarged hands symbolize protection, praise, labor, and healing—drawing inspiration from artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, and John Biggers. Hallelujah Anyhow carries forward Prince’s interest in perseverance and spiritual endurance, channeling gospel traditions and communal resilience into a dynamic visual rhythm. (lindamatneygallery.com)
Sow and Hallelujah Anyhow were featured in Matney Gallery’s exhibition Installation/Works on Paper 2023, where Prince’s monumental prints formed a central part of the exhibition’s dialogue between immersive installation practices and contemporary works on paper. These works continue Prince’s broader engagement with history, spirituality, jazz, social memory, and public life through richly layered symbolic imagery and masterful printmaking.
Selected works by Steve Prince will also be featured in an upcoming presentation at SATE: A New American Experience, extending the artist’s belief that art should remain embedded within community spaces and everyday cultural exchange.
Explore works by Steve Prince through Matney Gallery on Artsy and Installation/Works on Paper 2023.
Printmaker and educator Steve Prince remains a major presence within the gallery program. Known internationally for monumental woodcuts, public projects, and deeply layered visual storytelling, Prince’s work addresses spirituality, labor, migration, music, and collective history. His works have increasingly entered conversations around museum acquisition and institutional collecting throughout the American South and beyond. Recent placements through Matney Gallery have further connected Prince’s work with collectors interested in civic and community-centered contemporary art.
The gallery’s return to Artsy also highlights the work of Rebecca Shkeyrov, whose paintings merge psychological atmosphere with highly personal symbolic language. Her work occupies a compelling space between figuration and emotional abstraction, reflecting broader currents in contemporary painting while maintaining an intimate and independent voice.
John Lee Matney captures a fleeting moment of light, shadow, and quiet distance in this black-and-white photograph. The image transforms an everyday suburban scene into something cinematic and contemplative, reflecting Matney’s ongoing interest in memory, atmosphere, and human presence.
View works by John Lee Matney on Artsy
Kristin Skees’s Chicago transforms an iconic public space into something intimate, strange, and quietly humorous. A solitary figure draped in one of Skees’s hand-knit “cozies” stands before Cloud Gate (“The Bean”), merging softness and vulnerability with the monumental architecture of the city. Part of her ongoing Cozy Portraits series, the work explores identity, protection, visibility, and the tension between comfort and isolation within public space.
View works by Kristin Skees on Artsy via Matney Gallery
Kristin Skees works across photography, fiber, installation, and video, creating psychologically charged works that explore identity, domestic space, humor, collaboration, and the tension between comfort and constriction. Her acclaimed Cozy Portraits series merges portraiture, conceptual knitting, and performative installation, producing images that are simultaneously intimate, uncanny, and deeply human.
Kent Knowles’s Future presents a young boy seated within an enveloping field of flowers, balancing tenderness, uncertainty, and quiet psychological intensity. Unlike many of Knowles’s earlier works centered on figures navigating perilous or dreamlike environments, Future introduces a more reflective and intimate emotional space—where childhood, vulnerability, and imagination coexist within a lush, almost cinematic atmosphere. The painting’s dense floral setting functions both as sanctuary and symbolic terrain, suggesting growth, transformation, and the fragile beauty of becoming.
Known for building compositions through abstraction and intuitive mark-making, Knowles allows narrative to emerge gradually rather than illustrating a fixed story. In Future, the figure feels suspended between innocence and awareness, creating a work that is emotionally open-ended while remaining visually immersive. The painting continues Knowles’s longstanding exploration of psychological storytelling, painterly experimentation, and the emotional resonance of the human figure.
View Future and other works by Kent Knowles through Matney Gallery on Artsy
George Papadakis’s Chances Are captures the artist’s ongoing fascination with memory, nostalgia, and the emotional residue of everyday American life. Working in mixed media on watercolor board, Papadakis builds richly layered surfaces that blur the boundary between representation and recollection, allowing familiar imagery to feel both immediate and dreamlike. The work carries the atmosphere of a remembered scene—part cinematic still, part personal mythology—where color, gesture, and texture become vehicles for emotional recall.
For more than four decades, Papadakis has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in portraiture, popular culture, and the psychology of remembrance. In Chances Are, that sensibility becomes especially poignant, transforming fleeting moments into images that hover between presence and disappearance. His paintings continue to resonate through their combination of technical precision, painterly experimentation, and deeply human warmth.
View works by George Papadakis through Matney Gallery on Artsy
Kent Knowles brings a distinctive dimension to the gallery’s program through paintings that merge psychologically charged narratives, symbolic invention, and dynamic painterly structure. Known for compositions that balance emotional intensity with richly developed surfaces, Knowles has developed a highly recognizable visual language through decades of sustained studio practice. His inclusion reflects Matney Gallery’s commitment to artists whose work has evolved through long-term engagement with Southern cultural networks, independent studio traditions, and contemporary painting discourse.
Nicole Santiago brings a materially driven and interdisciplinary perspective to the gallery’s program through works that explore perception, constructed space, and layered visual experience through painting and installation. Alongside her role as a professor at William & Mary, Santiago has developed a practice that reflects Matney Gallery’s continued engagement with artists connected to significant academic and cultural communities shaping contemporary art in Virginia.
Also featured is Brian Kreydatus, who brings a psychologically intense and formally rigorous dimension to the gallery’s program through paintings and prints that confront vulnerability, physicality, and the complexities of the human condition. A longtime professor at William & Mary, Kreydatus has developed a body of work that balances direct observation with dreamlike narrative tension, reinforcing Matney Gallery’s commitment to artists whose practices bridge sustained studio inquiry, academic engagement, and contemporary figurative discourse.
As Matney Gallery expands its presence on Artsy, the platform will also create opportunities to further feature artists connected to the gallery’s broader curatorial and advisory initiatives, including photographers, painters, sculptors, and interdisciplinary artists working across the American South and international contemporary art networks.
Elizabeth Mead
Greensprings, Williamsburg, Virginia, April, 2020, 2020
Pinhole camera, gelatin silver contact print
14 × 10 in | 35.6 × 25.4 cm with frame included. VIEW WORKS
Artists likely to receive expanded visibility through future Artsy presentations include Jill Carnes, whose multidisciplinary practice connects painting, Southern experimental culture, music history, and artist-run traditions that emerged from Athens, Georgia’s broader creative community; Olga Tobreluts, known internationally for pioneering digital and post-internet imagery; Ivan Plusch, whose psychologically charged figurative paintings engage themes of identity, memory, and transformation; and Elizabeth Mead, whose photographic and mixed-media practice explores materiality, landscape, atmosphere, and the layered relationship between memory and place.
The gallery’s renewed presence on Artsy ultimately reflects a broader long-term effort: creating stronger pathways between artists, collectors, museums, universities, and cultural communities while remaining grounded in thoughtful curatorial relationships, sustained artistic practice, and meaningful institutional dialogue.
