Jordan Belson

Matthew Marks is pleased to present Jordan Belson: Landscapes. The exhibition features a series of collages made between 1970 and 1973.

Exhibited here for the first time, Jordan Belson’s landscape collages, created from torn paper painted in various colors, were inspired in part by the 1000-year-old Japanese art of chigiri-e, which uses torn paper to create images of landscapes and flowers.

Belson’s works range from depictions of interior, mental visions to the furthest reaches of the observable universe, evoking the hills that surround the San Francisco Bay or capturing a moon rising over an imagined world. “I’m trying to make pictures,” he said, “that focus and teach you about a knowledge that is beyond words.”

Known for his highly inventive approach to abstraction as well as his innovative use of non-traditional media, Belson always insisted on his work’s connection to the observable world, declaring: “I do everything I can to make everything connect up, to construct real events in an unreal world.”

Jordan Belson (1926–2011) is a seminal figure in twentieth-century avant-garde cinema. He studied painting as a young man, receiving a degree in studio art from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1946. He initially achieved some success as a painter, exhibiting his work at SFMoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in the late 1940s. After 1950, however, he focused primarily on filmmaking, and although he continued to make paintings and drawings for the remainder of his life, he never exhibited this part of his work again publicly during his lifetime.

This exhibition has been organized in association with Raymond Foye and the Estate of Jordan Belson.