Matthew Higgs
NO OIL PAINTING Make-Up Bag
£38
Italian leather cosmetic bag designed by Matthew Higgs, exclusive to House of Voltaire
Dimensions
10 x 16 x 3 cm
Finishing
Handmade Italian Leather
Matthew Higgs, Despair, 2000. © Matthew Higgs. Courtesy of Tate.
About The Artwork
Celebrating our 30th anniversary in 2024, Studio Voltaire has invited many major artists to revisit and reimagine some of their previous House of Voltaire releases for our “Greatest Hits”. Matthew Higgs has crafted a luxury Italian leather pouch for essentials, inspired by a 2006 screen print edition. Known for his sardonic use of text and found items, Higgs decontextualised a clichéd insult for his original edition framing it within the canon of art criticism, here the same phrase is parsed back into practical usage as a cosmetics bag, which fits a phone.
About Matthew Higgs
Matthew Higgs (born 1964) is an English artist, curator, writer and publisher. Since 1992 he has organised over 250 artists projects and exhibitions and written for more than 50 publications and art magazines.
He founded Imprint 93, promoting artists outside the Young British Artists mainstream of the period and releasing a series of artists’ editions including those by Martin Creed and Jeremy Deller. In 2000, he curated the "British Art Show 5". This major touring exhibition sought to show that British art embraced a wider range of practices than was indicated by the label "Young British Artists". His exhibition "Protest and Survive" at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 2000 reflected a renewed interest in the art of the 1970s.
In 2001 he relocated to the U.S., to San Francisco, where he became curator of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts, and later the co-chair of the College’s MFA program.
In 2006, he was one of the Turner Prize judges and was interviewed about the judging process by Sarah Thornton in Seven Days in the Art World. In 2007 he selected EASTinternational with Marc Camille Chaimowicz. In 2009 Higgs curated an exhibition of Lucas Samaras' work for Greece's national pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale.
Higgs lives and works in New York where he is director of the non-profit art space, White Columns.