Matt Rebholz

My name is Matt Rebholz and I am an artist and a professor of printmaking and drawing based in Austin, Texas. My recent work has to do with the intersections of science fiction, science fact and the spectrum of utopianism/dystopianism that those intersections represent. My work is inspired by comics, art historical figures such as Albrect Dürer, and technical illustration.

Most of these pieces are etchings, a 500 year old printmaking process. It involves hand drawing the images onto a copper plate, then submerging the plate in an acid that chemically etches the linework into the metal. Ink is then driven into the lines and it is transferred to paper by passing it under the steel roller of an etching press. I produce my prints in limited editions (typically between 5 and 20 impressions), and while very similar, each impression is unique. For more on how prints are made, please check out this excellent interactive cartoon produced by the Museum of Modern Art:

This piece explores the concept of the Arcology, a hybridization of the words architecture and ecology that refers to a self-contained, self-sufficient living structure. In this etching, rival arcologies constructed from various spacecraft components are densely packed together in a vertical environment reminiscent of an urban landscape. It is unclear to me whether they are cooperating or squaring off against each other.

Monolith is an image of a planetarium projector suspended
in space. The title refers to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
a movie that I often watch while I am working. The projection globe structure
has been showing up in a lot of other work lately, and reminds me of some
kind of cannon embankment or sea mine.

The Golem Chapter VII

The Golem Chapter XI

The Golem: Chapters VII & XI are from a series of
twenty etchings that chronicle a re-imagining of the story of the Golem,
the famous automaton of Jewish myth.

Beyond the Time Vortex is a gouache (opaque watercolor)
and ink drawing based on a map of the Fermilab complex in Illinois, home
to the Tevatron particle accelerator.

Tower is another gouache and ink drawing. Like Beyond
the Time Vortex, it features a partially submerged futuristic structure,
possibly as the result of some unnamed catastrophe.

Underground Experimental Cavern is the name of an actual
room at the Large Hadron Collider. It was an appropriate name for this
piece about an unpopulated subterranean chamber where it seems like a
sole survivor is waiting out the apocalypse and carrying out his important
work.

Kobayashi Maru is a wooden version of a container ship,
the vessels which transport an overwhelming majority of the world’s industrial
and consumer goods. All good nerds will recognize the title as a reference
to the unsolvable problem given to starship captains in Star Trek.

Blue Danube

Blue Danube - Details

Blue Danube features an enormous planetarium projection globe interacting
with the Russian space station Mir. The title has several meanings. On
one hand, it refers to On the Beautiful Blue Danube, the waltz by Johann
Strauss featured in the film 2001. However, it was also the codename of
Britain’s first operational atomic weapon. There is a wonderful symmetry
to the two uses of that phrase, which I thought appropriate considering
the menacing nature of the globe and the compromised nature of Mir, which
was deliberately de-orbited and crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2001.

You can see my work in person in a show at the Davidson
Galleries in Seattle that opens on June 3rd. Anyone in the Seattle
area should make sure to come out for the opening and say hi.

You can also see more of my work and contact me at my (woefully out of
date) website as well my page
on the Davidson Galleries website

Thanks for looking, hope you enjoyed the work.