In Conversation with Matt Thomas
On Time Travellers
Hunt Gallery
April 17, 2026 – May 23, 2026
Daniel Hunt: Maybe we can start with Bonnard. I was in Pittsburgh this weekend and saw a Bonnard painting that felt, in a way, like a time-travelling situation. It brought me right back into conversations we had about your work and art history. There was something about the painting that felt calibrated to another moment in time, and it really demonstrated the seriousness and clarity of your art historical sensibility.
You had told me that you had never seen one of Bonnard’s bathtub paintings in person before. What was it about those works that became compelling to you?
Matt Thomas: I kind of fell in love with Bonnard over the last few years. I haven’t really travelled much outside of places like Buffalo, so I had seen other Bonnards in person, but not the bathtub paintings. Those paintings definitely influenced one specific work in the show.
What I love is Bonnard’s sense of abstraction, especially the way he creates colour gradients through the tiles. But I’m also drawn to the story behind them. He painted his wife, Marthe, in the bathtub because she took daily baths to treat chronic physical pain.
That idea became important to me. I had made a few other bathtub paintings, and one of them came from a moment where I was super anxious and didn’t know what I was going to paint. A figure in a bathtub emerged from the material, and I realized it was supposed to be a scene of rest, but it was actually uneasy and anxious. It became a place of unrest.
So I started thinking about the bathtub differently. What if I flipped the narrative and thought of it as a treatment for chronic mental or emotional pain, or anxiety? That was the starting point for the bathtub painting in the show.
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Matt Thomas Time Traveller is open this week! Come see us Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 1 - 5!
Matt Thomas
Bathtile Green, 2026
Acrylic, oil, and kaolin powder on canvas, primed on reverse, oak frame
48½ x 60½ x 2 in.
123.19 x 153.67 x 5.08 cm
Hunt Gallery is pleased to present Time Traveler, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Matt Thomas and the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Bringing together interiors, still lifes, windows, flowers, chairs, books, and shifting landscapes, Time Traveler explores painting as a way of moving across time. For Thomas, painting is both personal and historical: a way of reflecting on lived experience while also entering into conversation with the long history of the medium. His works draw on the intimacy of domestic space and the rich legacy of French painting, while remaining grounded in the quiet symbolism of everyday objects and scenes. Through these familiar forms, Thomas builds paintings that hold memory, atmosphere, and feeling, treating painting itself as a vessel for reflection, return, and travel across time.
Matt Thomas
Flickering Light, 2026
Acrylic, oil, and kaolin powder on canvas, primed on reverse, poplar frame.
20½ x 22½ x 1¾ in.
52.07 x 57.15 x 4.45 cm
Hunt Gallery is pleased to present Time Traveler, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Matt Thomas and the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Drawing on the histories of French painting from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with artists such as as Bonnard, Vuillard, Morisot, Cassatt, Matisse, Valadon, and Van Gogh, Thomas’s works move through interiors, still lifes, windows, flowers, books, and shifting light to consider painting as a way of travelling across time.
Opening Friday, April 17, 6 to 9 PM at Hunt Gallery.
We are excited to be participating in Plural this week with a solo presentation of Kate O’Connor!
Kate O’Connor
Nail Salon
2026
Oil on Canvas
30 x 40 in.
76.20 x 101.60 cm
FACEHUGGERS continues this week!
Joanne Tod
Grace, 2026
oil on canvas
24 x 12 in.
60.96 x 30.48 cm
Joanne Tod
Ambivalence , 2026
oil on canvas
24 x 12 in.
60.96 x 30.48 cm
