Dan Yoshii is pleased to present Free Lunch, the latest body of work by Matt Maust. As a multidisciplinary artist, Maust’s practice presents a unique and progressive blend of fine art and popular culture across time and space.
Joining found images, pulp media, and pop culture references with paintings, drawings, and souvenirs from his own touring and travel, Maust creates work that blur the boundary between object and image. Each piece layers different materials and content into frenetic, witty, high-contrast mixed media. His work reflects the influence of synthetic cubism, Dada, and early avant-garde practices by incorporating textures and snapshots from the real world. Maust explores meaning and signification by extracting images and text from their original contexts and placing them into new relationships.
By incorporating images of celebrities, world-leaders, vacation destinations, and comics, Maust offers moments of recognition amongst disorientation. These vernaculars are scattered throughout the works, pointing to referents in our collective cultural conscious. Often, the disparate elements are laminated together with strips of clear packing tape, effectively sealing unrelated fragments together to reveal a singular art object. Through lifting found material from its environment, Maust explores culture and identity as it is reconstructed through media.
In Free Lunch, the namesake series of this exhibition, Maust examines the notion that innocuous acts are often followed by attendant hidden costs. The term “free lunch” first appeared in American culture when saloons enticed patrons with a complementary meal alongside alcohol purchases. A marketing gimmick that often meant marking up the price of beer or wine. In Hollywood, the expression “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” later proliferated the entertainment business as a means of pointing out concealed agendas or transactional motives behind seemingly innocent arrangements. “We’re all wandering amidst the ultimate free lunch,” Maust reflects, and yet it is so often the case that even “free” things come at a price.
Matt Maust is based in Los Angeles and is a founding member and creative director for the bands Cold War Kids and French Style Furs. He received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. Maust has exhibited his work throughout the United States, with shows in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami Beach; as well as internationally in the UK.
