Matthew Dibble

Born: 1957

Hometown: Cleveland, Ohio

Based in: Cleveland, Ohio

Matthew Dibble spent decades in the construction business, and approaches his art like a true tradesman: with watchful attention and professional confidence, he composes gesturally abstract and figural paintings marked by creative choreography. He attended Cleveland’s former defiantly inspiring Cooper School of the Arts, and has marched to his own drummer ever since graduating in 1978. Dibble’s ongoing body of work includes original, nuanced reactions to both modern and postmodern sensibilities, with as few aesthetic or philosophical pretensions as possible. A fascination with gesture and action continues to underlie his large-scale Abstract Expressionist paintings, while his figurative work deploys distorted, other-worldly creatures across layered surfaces that fascinate. His work has long displayed this double trajectory, in which expression moves towards meaning in the abstracts and also in the counterbalancing figural work—as if the right and left hemispheres of his brain were performing an intricate dance.

Matthew Dibble In The Studio

I’m trying to approach the work as a tradesman approaches his job, in a very ordinary way, with a watchful attention and a certain confidence that comes from experience while at the same time searching for something new.