Matt Bahen Bio

Matt Bahen Bio

Matt Bahen is an artist living and working in Toronto. Since graduating the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2002, Bahen has been exhibiting his work consistently in Toronto, and has shown his work in New York, Alabama, Alberta and Massachusetts.

His work addresses themes of war, conflict, history and compassion. Bahen’s approaches his subject through oil paintings of a human scale, applied with a thick impasto emphasizing the visceral quality of the delivery and subject.

Bahen’s most recent body of work “Run with the Hunted” deals with these themes and brings them back to landscape painting, the most quintessential of all Canadian art forms.

The landscapes contain a quiet dissonance and are inhabited by animals, representing characteristics of human archetypes. This is an effort to enable the viewers to find themselves in the painting, to be part f the landscape, to recognize themselves as individuals capable of compassion.