Matthew Day Jackson

Matthew Day Jackson was born in 1974 in Panorama City, California. He earned a BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1997, where his training centered on printmaking, and an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2001. He later studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and, in 2009, earned an NHRA drag racing license from Frank Hawley's Drag Racing School in Gainesville, Florida, a detail that recurs in his gallery biographies alongside his formal training.

Jackson first drew wide attention through the 2005 group exhibition Greater New York at P.S.1 in New York City. His practice spans sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video, performance, furniture design, and installation, often built from found materials and historical imagery addressing American myth, technology, and mortality. His 2009 survey The Immeasurable Distance grew out of an artist's residency at MIT. He is currently represented by Pace Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, and GRIMM, and gallery biographies place him living and working in Brooklyn, New York.

Critical attention to Jackson, including coverage in Artforum, has emphasized his use of found objects, historical imagery, and personal narrative to build a dense, idiosyncratic engagement with American history, treating disparate references as points that can be overlaid into a coherent personal narrative. His early inclusion in Greater New York at P.S.1 in 2005 and the survey The Immeasurable Distance, shown at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2009 to 2010, established him as an artist working seriously with American history and mortality through an eclectic material vocabulary. Subsequent solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth's Somerset and Zurich spaces and at the Spencer Museum of Art extended that reading into landscape, ecology, and the Anthropocene.

Jackson's institutional record, including his early inclusion in Greater New York at P.S.1 in 2005, museum solo exhibitions from 2009 onward, and holdings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, is considerably deeper than his public auction history. Aggregated market data from MutualArt associates a peak realized price of approximately USD 941,745 with the painting Bucky II (2007), but the specific auction house, location, and sale date behind that figure are not disclosed in the sources available, so it should be read as an approximate market ceiling rather than a confirmed single-lot record. Publicly viewable secondary-market results for the artist otherwise appear comparatively modest, illustrating a market that remains thin and unevenly documented relative to his museum standing.

Jackson's market is defined more by institutional depth than by auction liquidity. There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification should run through his current dealers, Pace Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, and GRIMM. Because the highest publicly cited auction price for his work lacks confirmed lot-level detail, collectors should treat any single "record price" figure with caution and weigh it against his broader, well-documented museum exhibition history rather than against a small and unevenly reported set of auction results.