British artist Matthew Stone photographs brushstrokes painted by hand, then cuts and reassembles them on a computer into a single image. His method is to then translate this completed image back into oil on canvas. Within his work, the boundaries between the handmade and the machine-made, between an actual painting and an image on a screen, become entangled. He describes himself as “a painter who uses traditional materials to explore contemporary image-making tools and the cultural changes they produce.”

Stone studied painting at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. He has since developed a distinctive body of work that spans photography and digital media while remaining rooted in painting. He has held solo exhibitions in Korea and abroad at venues including The Hole in New York, Unit London, Gallery COMMON in Tokyo, and Choi&Lager Gallery in Seoul. In 2019, he created the album cover for the musician FKA twigs, and in 2020 he took part in a collaborative project with the brand Gentle Monster.

At the heart of Stone’s practice is a distinctive process that moves between hand and machine. He first paints brushstrokes by hand and photographs them. He then cuts and combines these brushstroke images on a computer to construct a new composition. Finally, he meticulously translates the resulting image back into oil paint. Through this process, hand-painted passages, printed images, and painted renderings of screen-based images become interwoven within a single work. The materiality and weight particular to oil paint make it difficult to discern where the trace of the hand ends and the machine-made image begins.

Stone’s work took a turn in 2017. In the course of healing from trauma, he experienced a powerful spiritual awakening mediated by nature. For a year, he returned again and again to the same tree, sitting beside it and sustaining a practice of attending to whatever arose in the moment. Through this experience, he came to see nature not as a tranquil backdrop lying outside the self, but as a model for how to dwell within complexity without being overwhelmed by it. “This sense of resting at ease within complexity,” the artist says, “is the central feeling I hope to convey through my work.”

At this year’s Kiaf, Matthew Stone presents new paintings in oil. He has conceived the booth not as a collection of individual works but as a single interlocking network of paintings. Structured as a “booth within a booth,” with another room erected inside, it allows fragments of brushwork to spill beyond the canvases onto the walls. In one large-scale work, other paintings are painted back into the picture plane—a gesture that connects to the way Matisse depicted his own paintings within his canvases. The artist hopes viewers will “slow down and look at the works with care,” adding that “painting is at once a technology that has always existed and one that continues to evolve.”