This year we are celebrating 20 years of M+B. Every two weeks throughout the summer, we’re highlighting a photographer whose work helped define the gallery’s early program. Long before we became known for contemporary art, M+B began as a photography gallery—one that championed artists pushing the medium in new, culturally resonant directions. These photographers weren’t just documenting the world; they were embedding themselves in it, using unorthodox materials and techniques to create something visceral, immediate, and undeniably of their time.
Our next spotlight is on Matthew Brandt, whose experimental practice and enduring relationship with Los Angeles have made him one of the gallery’s most singular voices. Since his first show with us in 2011, Brandt has fused rigorous technique with elemental forces—using everything from lake water and charcoal to Coca-Cola and wildfire ash to shape his images.
This new body of work continues his exploration of the LA landscape through a technique developed in his Freewayseries, now turned skyward. Using plaster-based fresco methods, Brandt captures the winter sunsets over Los Angeles, translating the fleeting light and heavy air of the season into tactile, layered compositions. Each piece begins with photographic imagery transferred onto wet plaster, which then warps, cracks, and settles into its final form. The result is a series of atmospheric panels that feel both ancient and eerily current—monuments to a city in perpetual flux.
Brandt’s winter skies hover between memory and observation, conjuring the exact hues of dusk after a rainy December day, or the burnt pink that lingers over a freeway at rush hour. Like much of his work, these pieces are haunted by time—weathered, fractured, and deeply felt. They don’t just depict the LA sky; they contain it.
