Matthew Porter (b. 1975, State College, PA) received his BA from Bard College and his MFA from Bard-ICP. Recent solo exhibitions include This Is How It Ends, Danzinger Gallery, New York, NY; The Sheen, The Shine, Gallery Xippas, Geneva, Switzerland, and Skyline Vista, M+B, Los Angeles, CA. His work has also been included in the thematic exhibitions Autophoto at the Fondation Cartier, Paris; Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Polaroids: The Disappearing at Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, After Photoshop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Perspectives at the International Center of Photography Museum, New York. Porter's curatorial projects include Soft Target, organized with Phil Chang at M+B, Los Angeles; Seven Summits at Mount Tremper Arts, New York; and The Crystal Chain at Invisible Exports, New York. He is the co-editor of Blind Spot magazine Issue 45 and his writings and interviews have been featured in Triple Canopy, Blind Spot, Artforum and Canteen. The artist’s work is held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; and the UBS Art Collection, New York, among others. Matthew Porter lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
M+B is pleased to continue our 20th anniversary online series with new works by Matthew Porter. The show highlights his Flying Cars along with recent works exploring the eerie tranquility of flooded desert basins and the surreal presence of clustered butterflies in sunlit California landscapes.
His iconic Flying Cars series—gravity-defying images of vintage muscle cars suspended in motion. In the Desert Water photographs, Porter captures the ephemeral phenomenon of rainwater transforming the cracked earth of Death Valley into a mirror-like expanse, reflecting the surrounding mountains in quiet symmetry. The Last Butterflies series offers an equally uncanny sense of stillness and beauty—framed clusters of butterflies bask in diffused winter light, rendered with an almost hallucinatory clarity. Each image teeters between reality and invention, blending field photography with studio staging, digital montage, and the calculated logic of cinematic mise-en-scène.
Together, these works show Porter’s ongoing fascination with the boundaries of the photographic image—between fact and fiction, nostalgia and spectacle. Whether suspended midair or bathed in post-apocalyptic light, his subjects occupy a world where time seems to bend, suggesting a future both dreamlike and decaying.
