Fredericks & Freiser

About the Gallery
Fredericks & Freiser (est. 1996) is committed to showcasing emerging artists as well as recontextualizing artists of earlier generations. Fostering a continuum between past and present, the gallery’s curatorial program maintains a long history of focusing on artists who have made important contributions to the development of 20th and 21st century art.

About the Presentation
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Sam Mattax. His works unfold through layers of oil paint, raw canvas, and gestural line, creating compositions that shift between structure and dissolution. Mattax embraces contradiction—his paintings feel immediate yet unearthed, raw yet precise, forceful yet restrained.

Paint itself becomes a sculptural presence, at times hurled, smeared, or scrawled, rejecting polish in favor of something more physical and searching. His use of seductive pastels complicates expectations, luring the eye before withholding easy resolution. Motifs like spoked wheels and fractured grids function as unstable markers, suggesting meaning without fixing it in place.

Mattax’s work resists the demand for instant gratification, instead unfolding over time. While his process draws from the histories of gestural abstraction, his paintings refuse nostalgia, engaging instead in a restless interrogation of perception, emotion, and form.