Matt Rugg - Painter Sculptor
Matt Rugg (1935 – 2020) was a highly regarded British abstract artist and art school teacher, making drawings, painting and sculpture. He studied at King’s College, Newcastle from 1956, where he was taught by and then worked with Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton.
Rugg established his studio in London in the mid-1960s at a time when his work was included in group shows including Arts Council painting exhibitions, the London Group, and at the ICA. As a teacher at Chelsea School of Art from 1965 he always encouraged students to discover their own materials and ways of making.
Throughout the 1960s Rugg exhibited with the New Art Centre in London where his solo shows of constructions in carved and painted wood won critical acclaim. A solo show in Milan in 1965 raised his profile in Italy, and works inspired by industrial landscapes were exhibited in a group show in Paris in 1967.
In 1979 he was a prize winner in the 2nd National Exhibition hosted by Tolly Cobbold/Eastern Arts. This signalled a change of direction in his work, to fabricating in galvanised wire and sheet metal.
His work has been acquired for many collections including the Tate Gallery, the British Council, the Arts Council, the Contemporary Arts Society, and regional galleries in England, as well as private collections in the UK, France and the Netherlands.
Abstract drawings in mixed media and the “Anatomy series” of suspended galvanised wire sculptures form the main body of his most recent work made 1999 – 2020. A trilogy of shows which he titled Silent Notation (2011), Notations – between drawing and sculpture (2017), and Notations – passages, intervals (2022) acknowledge the inspiration of the work and ideas of musician and artist John Cage. The survey show Matt Rugg, Early and Late Works in 2022-23 celebrated the return of his work to the New Art Centre at Roche Court Sculpture Park.
Matt Rugg, Connecting Form, the first major retrospective of Rugg’s work exhibited at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle 2023-4, was well reviewed. The closing performance around the eight Anatomy sculptures featured interpretive dance by Space Area Dance with sound artist Tom White.
Films about his work screened in exhibitions include Not Wishing to Stand Still (2015) and How to be an Artist (2023).
The monograph Matt Rugg, The Many Languages of Sculpture by Michael Bird with Harriet Sutcliffe was published by Lund Humphries in 2023.
Dr Harriet Sutcliffe, guest curator for Rugg’s retrospective at the Hatton Gallery, wrote “Rugg’s work occupies a distinctive space between drawing, painting and sculpture, in a language uniquely his own. A consistency of rhythm and motif runs throughout his work across a sixty-year period drawing on influences from industrial landscapes and found objects to music, grids, maps and architecture”.
