“Our reality is a fractured one; composed of a disparate series’ of data-points and overlapping experiences that conspire to create a whole of understanding. Exploiting the ‘slow-think’ granted to the viewing of oil paintings, my artwork attempts to fuse the various experiential elements together to create an illusion of truth. “
– Mat Ollig
Mat Ollig is an oil painter living and working in NE Minneapolis, Minnesota. He studied at the Accademia di Bella Arte in Florence, Italy, and graduated from the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley, MN prior to receiving his BFA in Painting & Drawing from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) in Minneapolis, MN.
Mat’s large, multi-faceted paintings were a result of his continued fascination with memory, reality, and perception funneled through the lenses of history and oil painting. Ollig’s influences include the movements of Cubism, Postmodernism, and Relational Aesthetics, as well as the work of artists such as Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Alexander Ross.
Recently, a severe hand injury forced him to depart from his better-known style, resulting in a new body of work that explores his multi-panel imagery but on a flat surface. This new series focuses on the panels themselves as subject matter. Their arrangement is depicted as part of the composition, and painted on a singular canvas. The imagery is as bound to the surface, much as Mat’s hand’s movement is bound by bandages, creating a body of work that is as much an inward artistic exploration as it is a journey of physical recovery.
Mat Ollig’s work has been featured nationally, has been awarded the 2016, 2018, and 2020 MN State Arts Board Artists Initiative Grant, and has many paintings in notable permanent collections, including the Hyatt Regency, Schecter Dokken Kanter, Code42, Ogletree Deakins, BI Worldwide, and the Weisman Art Museum.