Bio

Matt Kube grew up in St. Louis and has lived in Kansas City for 27 years, remaining here after graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2001. He is a contemporary artist of original mixed media paintings and illustrations of cityscapes, incorporating collage, acrylic, oil and illustration in his works. His twenty-four-year career has produced artworks that merge a tradition of loose realism with the elegance of abstract form, resulting in art that is timeless, classical and modern.

Matt’s cityscapes portray brick facades, deteriorating buildings, elaborate masonry and the imagined possibility of what may be part of the cityscape in our future. His current works focus on balance, philosophy and the passing of time, manifested in: the boarding up of windows, the texture of a forgotten billboard, the elegance and starkness of a momentary shadow and the rich colors of brick and stone. He also uses shadows to describe a particular moment, which emphasizes the impermanence of our views and his desire to preserve local historic architecture. The wears and tears of the buildings fabricate the passage of time and make our cities the unique environment that they are. However, some efforts to save these icons of the past are taken for granted and come to an end.
 

Matt paints for preservation, creating a record of architecturally rich buildings, places, views and cityscapes so that he may celebrate and document the aesthetic beauty of our past and raise public awareness of redevelopment possibilities of distressed historic buildings and places. His goal is to create beautiful documents of historic views through his work and help save the buildings and structures that he treasures.