Landon Metz

Landon Metz (b.1985, Phoenix, Arizona) is a New York-based contemporary artist whose practice explores painting as a meditative activity: “I’m totally invested in the possibility that one can be present in the world with curiosity, openness and awareness. Just looking, and allowing something to be what it is, can be incredibly enriching. I use my practice as a kind of tool for magnification”.

In recent years Metz has garnered positive critical attention for his ability to imbue the spare language of abstraction with dynamism and movement. Strategies of display are central to Metz’s visual language, which often incorporates the vocabulary of sculpture and installation. As a result, Metz’s site-responsive paintings – they frequently abut one another, reach into or wrap around corners – have the capacity to expand and contract space. 

Compositionally, Metz often repeats his organic forms across the canvas so that they evoke a sense of rhythm and flow. To create these forms Metz paints thin washes of acrylic dye onto raw canvas; soaking up dye, they are saturated with deep colour at their edges, lighter and fluid in the middle. Often they stretch beyond the margin of the canvas, hinting at the space beyond. 

Metz’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Canada, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, the United States and the United Kingdom. In 2014, he was artist in residence at the ADN Collection in Bolzano, Italy and in 2018, Metz was the subject of a solo exhibition at Museo Pietro Canonica in Rome. In 2021, Waddington Custot debuted Metz’s work in the United Kingdom with the exhibition ‘Love Songs’ and its accompanying publication.

A transdisciplinary artist, in 2023 Landon Metz released his debut album Six Days at the Orange House on Sensitive Records, a deeply personal piece in which he explores similar themes in music as an extension of his painting and installation practice. 

Metz  lives and works in Manhattan, New York.