Matthew Picton

Matthew Picton (b. London, England) is a sculptor and assemblage artist living and working in Ashland, Oregon, whose hand-cut paper works collapse historical timelines through carefully constructed layers of archival pigment prints, architectural drawings, film stills, newspaper headlines, and vellum. Trained in Politics and History at the London School of Economics, Picton brings a scholar's instinct for research to a practice that is unmistakably sensory, building compositions that are as visually immersive as they are conceptually layered. His works function somewhere between map, bas-relief, and cinematic still, synthesizing human, religious, and geographical memory into objects that reward slow looking.

His most recent exhibition at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, A Deeper Picture (2025), marked his sixth solo presentation with the gallery and drew on the metaphysical films of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky alongside art-historical references and architectural blueprints by French architect Paul Letarouilly. Earlier exhibitions including City of Apparitions and Eschatologies established the recurring concerns of his practice: the cyclical nature of history, the intersection of ancient and contemporary culture, and the way parallel acts of making and viewing constitute a kind of communion with the stories embedded in material itself.

Picton's work is held in the collections of the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, UK; the Stadt Museum, Dresden; and the New York University Langone Medical Center, New York. In 2020, he completed large-scale commissions for Facebook in Seattle and Google in Redwood City, California.