Matthew Kluber

Matthew Kluber (b. 1965) is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of painting, digital technology, light, and time. For more than three decades, Kluber has investigated what happens when the fixed physical space of painting encounters the continuously changing space of digital media. His hybrid works combine precisely painted surfaces with programmed video projections, creating compositions that exist simultaneously as paintings, moving images, and experiences unfolding over time.

Kluber's paintings often begin with layered bands, grids, and geometric structures applied to aluminum panels. Onto these physical surfaces he projects digitally generated patterns of color and light. The projected sequences are programmed to change continuously without simply repeating, producing an image that can never be experienced in exactly the same way twice. Static painted forms interact with ephemeral digital ones, making it increasingly difficult to determine which colors and edges physically exist on the surface and which are produced by projected light.

This merging of physical and virtual space has been central to Kluber's practice since the emergence of personal computing and digital imaging technologies. Early encounters with computer graphics—including the unexpected patterns generated when primitive computer systems malfunctioned—helped shape his interest in the visual possibilities of digital information. Rather than abandoning painting for new media, Kluber began considering how the two might occupy the same pictorial space.

His work draws upon histories of geometric abstraction, Op Art, Minimalism, and Color Field painting while introducing elements unavailable to earlier generations of painters: coded behavior, projection, duration, and continuous transformation. The resulting works complicate the distinction between object and image. A painting remains materially present on the wall while light temporarily alters its color, structure, depth, and visual rhythm.

Technology is therefore not simply a tool within Kluber's practice but part of its subject. His work developed alongside the extraordinary technological changes that have transformed contemporary visual experience—from analog television and early personal computers to digital imaging, software, screens, and the increasingly fluid boundary between physical and virtual environments. Kluber has cited the social, cultural, scientific, and technological upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s as an important source for his thinking.

Alongside his painting/projection works, Kluber has produced drawings, prints, films, digital works, and large-scale public projects. These works extend his investigation of abstraction into architectural and public space, where projected and moving images can alter the experience of buildings and environments.

Kluber has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions and exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai; FOCUS09/Art Basel, Switzerland; Orlando Museum of Art; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; Grand Rapids Art Museum; Portland Art Museum; Des Moines Art Center; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha; and the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation. In 2017, his work was included in Virtual Views: Digital Art from the Thoma Foundation at the Orlando Museum of Art, alongside artists including Jim Campbell, John Gerrard, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Manfred Mohr, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Leo Villareal.

Haw Contemporary has maintained a sustained relationship with Kluber, presenting solo exhibitions including Radio_Free Santa Fe (2019), Split Infinitives (2021), and Floating Opera (2026).

His work is held in museum and institutional collections including the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Figge Art Museum, Davenport; University of Colorado Art Museum, Boulder; Austin Museum of Art at Laguna Gloria; Rockford Art Museum; and the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, as well as corporate collections including Estée Lauder Companies.

Kluber received an Iowa Artist Fellowship from the Iowa Arts Council/National Endowment for the Arts in 2019–20. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987 and his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1991. He is Professor of Art at Grinnell College, where he teaches print media, digital media, drawing, and hybrid media.