de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of mixed-media wall works and sculpture by Matthew Kirk in Los Angeles. In Kirk’s first solo exhibition with de boer, the New York-based artist presents large and medium-scale works evoking art historical antecedents from Henri Matisse, Christopher Wool, and Joe Fedderson as well as traditional pictography, abstraction, and the cultural memory of his upbringing. The exhibition’s title, In a Time of Darkness, This Is Wonderful News, captures the spiritual optimism embedded in Kirk’s process that leads with joy, clarity, and connection. Honoring both a contemporary aesthetic and the cultural imagery of his childhood, having been born in Arizona, and relocating to the Wisconsin shores of Lake Michigan, Kirk balances vivid formalism with personal symbolism. Recurring silhouettes of feathers, trees, moons, and limbs appear and reappear across the panels, embedded in shifting environments of sky blues, flat blacks, and fluorescent pinks. The surfaces evoke graffiti, pattern languages, and craft traditions that dwell in the space between recognition and mystery, between mark and meaning. Kirk channels a history of image making grounded in landscape, spirit, and signal, updating it through urban materials, vibrant color, and compositional fragmentation. In a Time of Darkness, This Is Wonderful News, Kirk scales up these dialogues, and his arrangements become compositions that hum with rhythm and coded energy. They feel simultaneously ancient and now, analog and digital, sacred and irreverent. The title becomes more than poetic, it suggests the function of the work itself, a flare of identity and meaning, sent up amidst the static and urgency of contemporary life. Image: Matthew Kirk "A Day of Stillness," 2025