About

Matt Wilburn

Matt Wilburn is a Seattle-based artist whose work has moved from bold portraits to abstractions that resist easy reading and reward deeper examination.

His early portraits employed sharp planes of color and precise lines to distill cultural icons into instantly recognizable images. His current paintings ask more of their viewers, layering symbols, fragments, and encoded sequences drawn from decades of study in science, technology, history, and philosophy. These works weave hidden logics and function like ciphers — intentional, layered, and resistant to a single, simple takeaway.

Inspired by Basquiat’s critical social commentary, and by artists such as Van Gogh, Dubuffet, and Guston — each of whom left behind earlier modes of success in search of less certain ground — Wilburn embraces a practice that is exploratory, sometimes unsettling, and without clear contemporary analogs.