MATT McCORMICK solo exhibition DREAM LIVE DIE

Sho+1 is pleased to announce DREAM LIVE DIE, a solo exhibition by Matt McCormick from Tuesday, March 10 through Saturday, April 4, 2026.

Los Angeles–based artist Matt McCormick is a contemporary artist who has gained attention for his cross-disciplinary practice spanning fine art, music, and road culture, while also operating an apparel brand, and maintains an Instagram following of approximately 130,000.

For this exhibition, the artist will visit to Japan, and an opening reception will be held on the first day. 
In addition, new works by McCormick will be presented at the Sho+1 booth during Art Fair Tokyo at Tokyo International Forum from March 13 to 15.
 We warmly invite you to experience the works while moving between the gallery and the fair — two spaces that together frame the exhibition.

We look forward to your visit to the gallery.

<On the Exhibition ー Matt McCormick>

The show is built around a set of American images that have been repeated long enough to feel familiar. A lot of that history is violent. Over time, the violence flattens out. It turns into images, dates, references. Things you recognize without reacting to much anymore. That condition is where the work sits. At the center of the space is a one-of-one book titled Dream Live Die. It sits on a table. The book is part of the exhibition. It isn’t a catalogue. The cover copies the original design of The Scarlet Letter. It points to judgment and consequence as inherited structures rather than ideas that need explanation. Seven postcard works are installed on the walls. Each one references a specific moment in American history. The images are already known. Each postcard is paired with a field of color. The color isn’t there to explain the image. It just sits next to it. On the back of each frame is a handwritten note. The Shaker chair and table are functional objects. They come from a belief in order and restraint. In the room, they don’t comment on the work. They hold the book. The larger paintings combine personal images and public history. One uses JFK alongside a Misfits Bullet poster I had on my wall when I was younger. Another uses an image of West Point cadets celebrating the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The images are presented without adjustment or resolution. The exhibition ends with a painting referencing CocaColonization. Coca-Cola is a familiar object that carried American influence quietly by blending into everyday life. That invisibility no longer holds. The image becomes.

<Artist Profile>

Matt McCormick
Born in 1987

Matt McCormick’s work operates at the intersection of cultural memory and material presence, distilling the residue of the American West into a highly personal yet broadly resonant visual language. Engaging with painting, drawing, and mixed media, McCormick’s practice navigates the tension between historic mythologies and contemporary detritus, where cowboys, highways, and Hollywood dreams dissolve into the textures of lived experience.

His work resists nostalgia, instead treating the American landscape as both a subject and a surface—one marked by erasure, reinvention, and cyclical decay. Fragments of signage, silhouettes of riders, and expanses of negative space suggest an inheritance in flux, a past that refuses to settle. Rather than reconstructing lost narratives, McCormick’s compositions act as palimpsests, where the West exists less as a fixed location and more as a shifting psychological terrain.

Informed by his time in Los Angeles and New York, McCormick’s art is as much about presence and transience as it is about identity and place. Through his practice, he locates poetry in fragmentation, exploring the American mythos not as a linear history but as a field of contradictions—unfinished, unsettled, and always in motion.

McCormick lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Miami, London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Aspen, and San Francisco.

MATT McCORMICK
Instagram：@mattrmccormick
Website：https://www.mattrmccormick.com

<Exhibition Overview>
MATT McCORMICK Solo Exhibition DREAM LIVE DIE
Date：March 10 (Tue) – April 4 (Sat), 2026
Time：12:00 – 18:00/ Closed on Sundays, Mondays and Public Holidays
Venue：Sho+1
Supported by：Hiromatsu Furniture Inc. LURF GALLERY

※Opening Reception
March 10 (Tue) 6pm – 8pm
The artist will attend the reception.

ART FAIR TOKYO 20
Date：March 13 (Fri) – 15 (Sun), 2026
Venue：Tokyo International Forum / B2F Hall E and Lobby Gallery
Sho+1 Booth : S033