Matt Connors

Matt Connors was born in 1973 in Chicago, Illinois. He earned a BFA from Bennington College in 1995 and, after a gap of more than a decade, an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2006. He lives and works in New York City.

Connors's paintings work through color relationships, grids, and a modernist vocabulary of shape and surface, building on and questioning the language of postwar abstraction rather than repeating it. His first solo museum presentation in the United States, Impressionism, opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2012, the same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 2014 survey The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World and in the Walker Art Center's Painter Painter (2013), two exhibitions that placed him within a broader institutional reassessment of contemporary painting. In 2024 he received the Award of Merit Medal in Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and held a solo exhibition, Positions, at Ortuzar Projects in New York. As of 2026 he continues to exhibit actively, including Cooperative Village at Herald St's Bologna space and a presentation at Frieze Los Angeles.

Connors's work has been discussed in major art press by critics including Roberta Smith, Jerry Saltz, and Holland Cotter, though no exact, publishable quotation from a named critic could be verified for this profile. The critical throughline in institutional programming, from the Museum of Modern Art's Impressionism (2012) through MoMA's The Forever Now (2014) and the Walker's Painter Painter (2013), positions him within a generation of painters reconsidering abstraction's modernist inheritance through color and structure rather than gesture.

Public auction data for Matt Connors is thin. The highest price identified in available auction records is USD 112,500, for Second Pitch, Shift at Phillips, with two further five-figure results in British pounds, Thirds (red/warm grey) and Fifth Thirds, also at Phillips. The exact sale dates for these lots could not be confirmed from available sources, and a higher, unlisted result cannot be ruled out. His market activity to date appears to run primarily through his three representing galleries rather than through a substantial resale history, which is consistent with an artist whose reputation has been built through museum exhibitions and gallery placements.

Matt Connors's market is not yet defined by a well-documented auction record, and collectors should treat any secondary-market pricing they encounter with caution until a fuller sales history is established. His standing rests instead on consistent representation by three respected international galleries and on a steady accumulation of museum exhibitions and public collections. There is no known catalogue raisonne; provenance and authenticity should be confirmed through his representing galleries.