Interview with Matthew Deleget
by Erin Gleason

The following text appeared in Cultural Fluency: Engagements with Contemporary Brooklyn curated / edited by Erin Gleason and published by The Rotunda Gallery / BRIC, Brooklyn, NY, 2013.

Does a "pluralistic approach" to your work include purposefully engaging with other artists and other types of creative practice?

By "pluralistic" I mean to say that everything is on the table. All content, all materials, all strategies, historical and current. Les, and that does include directly engaging, collaborating with, or even sometimes undermining other artists both here and elsewhere.

How have these engagements and the founding of MINUS SPACE (a gallery and platform for reductive visual art on the international) affected your art practice?

It has made my work much better. I've been able to directly engage in a divergent array of ideas, histories, contexts, and strategies from around the globe. I'm specifically interested in abstraction and NYC does have a long history with it, but it is by no means the only history of it.

How do you view your work and MINUS SPACE in the wider context of the city?

I view MINUS SPACE as a Brooklyn gallery and I see it aligned much more with artists' studio practice than a retail space. As everyone knows, the lion's share of NYC's artistic community lives here in Brooklyn. I lived here for nearly 20 years. I went to graduate school at Pratt. I'm raising my family here in Boerum Hill. I want my gallery to be a part of my neighborhood. I believe many people think Brooklyn galleries really aspire to move to Manhattan, which definitely happened during the early 2000s (most of those galleries are now closed). I'm not one of them.

Is it important for you to operate in the "gray area'?

If by "gray area" you mean uncompromised and sustainable at the gallery, it's very important to me. It's a lot of hard work, but I've honestly never been happier.

Matthew Deleget is an abstract painter, curator, and writer. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, in both solo and group exhibitions. Deleget has received awards from the American Academy of Arts of Letters, Brooklyn Arts Council, and The Golden Rule Foundation. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Flash Art, and Artnet Magazine, among others. From 1998-2009, Matthew worked at the New York Foundation for the Arts, where he founded and directed NYFA's Information & Research Department. In 2003, Matthew founded MINUS SPACE, a platform for reductive art on the international.