ABOUT THE ARTIST
Marty Matthys
Visual artist working through drawing and symbolism to explore vulnerability, connection and our relationship with ourselves, others and the natural world.
BIOGRAPHY
Marty Matthys is a Belgian visual artist whose practice centres on detailed, hand-drawn works. Through recurring images of bodies, animals and natural forms, he explores vulnerability, connection and the shifting relationship between the inner self and the world around us.
His experience as an art therapist informs his attentive way of looking, while drawing offers him a slow and tactile counterpoint to an increasingly digital visual culture. Each work develops through observation, intuition and the patient accumulation of lines.
Born in 1987, Marty Matthys is a Belgian visual artist from Damme, based near Gent. He holds a Master’s degree in Visual Arts, specialising in Graphics and Illustration, from LUCA School of Arts. He is also a qualified arts teacher and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Art Therapy. Alongside his artistic practice, he works as a psychotherapist and non-verbal therapist.
ON THE WORK
The work of Marty Matthys is poetry in line. With pen and ink, he builds, line by line, a universe that is both still and charged with tension.
His figures are imposing and vulnerable. From a distance, they appear almost whole. But those who look more closely begin to see their fragility: naked, cracked, torn. Only their skin remains as a final barrier, beneath which stories rage that cannot easily be told — stories of loss, hope, surrender and struggle.
The beauty of his bodies is never without consequence. They raise questions about intimacy and loneliness, about loving when faced with powerlessness, and about how to endure as a human being.
Emptiness speaks too. His figures sometimes seem to dissolve into their surroundings, as though the boundaries between body and world were also beginning to fade. It leaves room for what is not drawn, for what cannot immediately be named. Marty draws not only what is visible, but also what moves beneath it.
Perhaps that is precisely where the power of his work lies. The drawings ask for time, closeness and a second look. Somewhere between the precision of the line and the fractures in the image, a silence emerges in which the viewer sees something of themselves reflected. You look at a world set down on paper and gradually realise that this world is also revealing something of you.