After experience with photography and a class at The Art Students League, Matthew Sprung began to teach himself to paint in 2016. His work considers political, cultural, historical, and autobiographical subject matter through a combination of expressionism, portraiture, abstraction, and figuration. Most recently, he has begun to explore the shared open spaces of parks through large landscape paintings using oil and acrylic on unstretched canvas.
Because of a family member’s experience losing her family in World War Two, I have always been drawn to seeking out and confronting injustice. Because I have always loved painting, the MFA program at SAIC gave me a perfect opportunity to grow my development as an artist by doing the very difficult work of considering what it means to be an American, and looking at the historical injustices that line our country’s past and present in order to fight for a better and more equal future.