Mattise Exhibition

The Mattise exhibition takes place at the Museum of Modern Art, and it’s all about colors and cut-outs. The artist, Henri Mattise, used cut-outs of colorful sheets, in various shapes and placed it carefully and neatly on a large sheet to represent an eye-catching artwork composing his own ideas in it. Observing in the exhibition, I got that four things mainly inspired him. First, he was mostly inspired by nature, and this is shown in the organic shapes of the cut-outs; most of the shapes look like plants, trees, leaves, etc. and they’re placed on the sheet to form another shapes. Secondly, the human form; Mattise used the organic and other geometric shapes to form human bodies in many different poses, representing an idea or a story. Thirdly, the spiritual sense; some of Mattise’s pieces shows a religious, Christian mind behind.Finally and most importantly, colors; the use of color in his pieces is quiet interesting, and it caught my attention more than anything in this exhibition, and I kept wondering whether the color decisions were random or not. Watching a video of the process of his work on a screen at the exhibition made me wonder even more, because he seemed to cut the shapes randomly, although, his decisions were so accurate when it came to placing the cut-outs on the sheets. I also noticed that he used variety of materials as a background, such as paper, canvas, and silk screens. In my opinion, it seems that Mattise likes to combine several ideas or inspirations together to form one piece of art, so each piece of his could have more than one story, idea, or inspiration behind.