Matias Brimmer

Matias Brimmer is a Chicago-based figurative painter from East Lansing, Michigan. He earned an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2026, and a BFA from Michigan State University in 2021. Matias has maintained a studio practice for 14 years and has been teaching painting and drawing since 2022. 

Graduate Thesis Exhibition (group), School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 2026; It Will Destroy You (group), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago, Illinois, 2026; Threadings (group), Parlour and Ramp Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 2025; 94th Michigan Contemporary Art Exhibition (group), Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, Michigan, 2023; Rendering Identity, Arts Council of White Lake—Nuveen Center, Whitehall, Michigan, 2022; 93rd Michigan Contemporary Art Exhibition (group), Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, Michigan, 2022; Fragments of Being (solo), Michigan Institute of Contemporary Art, Lansing, Michigan, 2021; Capstone Thesis Exhibition, Kresge Art Center, Gallery 101, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, 2021.

Curation

Keeping Time, Michigan Institute of Contemporary Art, September 2017–November 2017; Different Strokes, Michigan Institute of Contemporary Art, February 2018–April 2018.

My practice wrestles with the fraught relationship between masculinity, erotism, and power. In my paintings, muscular cops and soldiers dominate their eager counterparts, both parties overtaken by ecstatic libidinal force—dissolving into and held together by turbulent explosions of gestural brushwork. The work emerges from the symbolic imagination, where sex and violence are deeply intertwined. From the classic trope of a child mistaking their parents’ love-making for fighting to the recurrent depiction of intimacy through the language of force—penetration as entry, invasion, or conquest—our culture holds these seeming opposites in a state of uneasy, charged coexistence.

Nowhere is this tension more visible—or more aggressively disavowed—than in BDSM and other “extreme” sexual subcultures, which are frequently characterized as perversions, deviations from normal, healthy sexuality. This, however, obscures a more profound and potentially uncomfortable reality: these practices literalize dynamics of domination and submission that are latent in even our most tame and romanticized ideas of intimacy. Moreover, the eroticization of these power relations is not an incongruity which sexuality persists in spite of, but rather is one of the very things that fuels desire itself.

It is impossible to separate this understanding of sexuality from the patriarchal structuring of our society, and the normative archetypes of masculinity which it valorizes. My work engages the convergence of these threads in male homosexual desire. The cop, the soldier, the “bad boy”—all of which make regular appearances in erotic art and pornography—exemplify the draw of dangerous figures of authority and hint at a complicated relationship between the drive to dominate and submit. The motif of male wrestlers is an emblem of these dynamics that recurs throughout the Western canon. Michelangelo, Bacon, and Tom of Finland have all presented variations on this subject that underscore the ambivalence of violence and sex. While my work does not seek to resolve these entanglements—nor to liberate sexuality from power or power from violence—it seeks to make visible power dynamics and struggles that form the very fiber of the world we inhabit.

I use a fluid and gestural style of painting to channel the visceral subject matter I depict. Flowing contours, smeared and dripping paint mirror the intensity of the libidinal encounter. The grotesque exaggerations and deformations of the male form embody and caricature the tensions of masculinity in its most extreme and corrosive state. Phalluses are waved around like weapons, distinctions between pleasure and pain blur in the confusion of erotic combat. I am updating the aesthetic of expressionism, where extreme color, line, shape, and space confront the viewer, leaving them face-to-face with the seductive drama of the painted mark.