Matthew Collings - Life and Career

Life and Career

In one of his books on art, Collings states that, in his early teenage years, he ran away to Canada. This act was preceded by a period of hanging around in a house in Oakley Street, Chelsea, whose residents included members of various rock bands including Mighty Baby and Family. For many weeks Collings was the object of an internationally coordinated police search.

Collings trained at Byam Shaw School of Art, and Goldsmith's College, and still practises as an artist. He edited Artscribe 1983-7. Collings was a producer and presenter on the BBC The Late Show 1989-95. In the early 1990s, he brought Martin Kippenberger into the BBC studios to create an installation, and he interviewed Georg Herold while this Cologne-based conceptual artist painted a large canvas with beluga caviar.

Collings also wrote and presented documentary films for the BBC on individual artists, such as Donald Judd, Georgia O'Keeffe and Willem de Kooning, as well as broader historical subjects such as Hitler's "Degenerate art" exhibition, art looted in the Second World War by Germany and Russia, Situationism, Spain's post-Franco art world and the rise of the Cologne art scene.

After leaving the BBC, Collings wrote and presented the Channel 4 TV series This is Modern Art, which won him a Bafta (1998) among other awards. He was originally identified as a proponent of Britart, however more recently his sympathies have become ambiguous or even hostile to it. He wrote in the New Statesman:

"A new popular audience is obsessed by contemporary art. But I think they are being sold something that isn't really there: an all-in package of spirituality, depth and profundity. I am afraid the official institutions of contemporary art are just lying about this stuff."

Collings wrote and presented a Channel 4 series in 2003 about the "painterly" stream of Old Master painting, called Matt's Old Masters. A book by the same title accompanied the series. Further Channel 4 series by Collings included Impressionism: Revenge of the Nice (2004) and The Me Generations: Self Portraits, (2005).

For some years Collings presented the Channel 4 TV programme on the Turner Prize. He has described himself as "an apologist for contemporary art", although in the same interview he confessed that this is more a popular assumption about him than his own idea.

In October 2007, with his wife, Emma Biggs, Collings curated and wrote a catalogue essay for an exhibition of Picasso's late works at the HN Gallery in London. The paintings were from the 1960s series of Painter and Model and Déjeuner sur l’herbe reworkings. According to the catalogue essay the exhibition aimed to draw attention to Picasso's achievement as a manipulator of form rather than the popular myth of Picasso as a showman or lover or sensationalist genius.

That year, Collings presented the Channel 4 TV series "This is Civilisation". In 2009 he appeared on the BBC2 programme "School of Saatchi" a reality TV show for newly trained UK artists. He lectures at City and Guilds of London Art School. In October 2010, he wrote and presented a BBC2 series called Renaissance Revolution, in which he discussed three Renaissance paintings: Raphael's Madonna del Prato; Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights; and Piero della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ.

Collings' abstract paintings are created in collaboration with mosaicist, Emma Biggs. In an article in the Daily Telegraph, Wednesday 18 April, 2012, by Colin Gleadell, it was reported that Collings' and Biggs' last exhibition at the Vigo Gallery, Old Bond Street, had sold out. Also in 2012 their painting "The Greater Light" won runner-up prize in the John Moores Painting Competition.

Collings has a regular monthly column in the art magazine ArtReview ("Great Critics and Their Ideas"), in which he "interviews" historical figures whose influence on art has been decisive. In one of these Soren Kirkegaard says of today's art enthusiasts, "What they're not baffled about, because to them they are as natural as breathing, are the morally indefensible moves that have to be made all the time in order to keep something as trivial as the artworld going."