Biographie

Born in Nottingham in 1966, Matt Collishaw lives and works in London. A 1989 graduate of Goldsmith College, he belongs to the generation of young British artists who were in large part discovered through the “Freeze” exhibition organised by Damien Hirst at the Surrey Docks in London in 1988.
His work essentially consists of photographs, installations and videos, through which he questions our relationship to images and their status. Collishaw plays with the reception of the images he presents, often hiding the real nature of what he shows under a meticulous aesthetic, a highly attractive visual beauty. What lies behind the Elizabethan aesthetic or the total kitsch of his photography or video installations, however, are images of violence, sickness, torture, death, suicide or poverty which he has taken from magazine illustrations, medical images or police files, selected for their crudeness and inherent provocation.
By exploiting contemporary society’s fascination with violence, death, sex and perversion, he brings out the disparity between reality and its representation. Digital manipulations and the use of optical illusion techniques (mosaic effects, projection of images onto real elements) allow him to ‘destroy reality in order to see it again’.[1]
In a 1993 article entitled ‘Attention, les images nous regardent’ (Attention, the images are looking at us), Françoise Jaunin wrote: Through a curious reversal, Mat Collishaw’s images have less value in and of themselves than for what they teach us about ourselves looking at images. His images, moreover, are not something he makes himself. He settles for taking hold of readymade images (like we speak of readymade ideas) and reproducing them through inexpensive mechanic processes. In order to emphasise the gap between them and the reality they are supposed to document. That gap, like a crack in the traditional system of representation, is where Collishaw introduces the uneasiness. On discovering one of the English artist’s exhibitions, visitors feel like they’ve been caught, not with their hand in the till but with their eye in the viewfinder. And here, the viewfinder turns against them and makes them voyeurs of their own gaze and the exhibitionism without morality of a society they are party to.’[2]

As the artist explains, ‘What interests me is the way the images strike me subliminally. . . . Whether we like it or not, there are mechanisms inside of us which are set off to respond to all kinds of visual materials, without letting us decide what stimulates us. The ads found on television and in glossy magazines are designed to exert power over the mind even before they can be called into question. The dark side of my work concerns above all the internal mechanisms of visual imagery and how these mechanisms address themselves to the mind.’
Collishaw’s first work presented publicly is a photographic installation entitled Bullet Hole. It consists of a close-up photo of a bullet wound on a skull which is fragmented into fifteen light boxes. At first glance, the image, drawn from a medical book, is not identifiable and viewers think they are seeing a flower, a woman’s genitals or an abstract composition.
Several of his later works relate to suicide, notably Burnt Almonds (2000), a photographic recreation of the suicides of Nazi leaders at the end of the Second World War. In his more recent pieces, Collishaw turns to new forms but always according to the same principle of opposition between the appearance of the work and its subject. He presents, for example, photographs or videos of homeless people in the streets of London which he places in ‘snow globes’ (the plastic balls filled with snowflakes which are supposed to recall the winders of each city) as souvenirs for giant tourists. In January 2002, Véronique d’Auzac observed the following change in Collishaw’s work: ‘These new creations reflect the artist’s successful maturation process. transformation from a purely provocative dimension into a more effective rebellion based on ambivalent feelings and generating a seductive uneasiness. These installations preserve the subversive vein which is indispensable to the impact of the result but they now take on a more poetic dimension without abandoning the energy of desire and pleasure.’[3]

Emilie Benoit

Translation Miriam Rosen

[1] . Stuart Morgan and Françoise Jaunin, Mat Collishaw. Interview by Alison Sarah Jaques, Galerie Analix, Geneva, 1993.
[2] . Ibid. [3] . Véronique d’Auzac, Art Press no. 275, January 2002.