Born in Somerset, England, Matt Rugg (1935 - 2020) was a highly regarded British artist and art school teacher, making drawings, painting and sculpture. He studied at King’s College, Newcastle from 1956, where he was taught by and then worked with Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton.

Rugg established his studio in London when his work was included in group shows including the Arts Council’s Young Contemporaries and travelling exhibitions, the London Group, and at the ICA. As a teacher at Chelsea School of Art from 1965 he encouraged students to discover their own materials and ways of making.

Throughout the 1960s Rugg exhibited with the New Art Centre in London where his solo shows of constructions in carved and painted wood won critical acclaim.  In 1978 he was a prize winner in the 2nd National Exhibition hosted by Tolly Cobbold/Eastern Arts. This signalled a change of direction in his work, to fabricating in galvanised wire and sheet metal

His work has been acquired for public collections including the Tate Gallery, the British Council, the Arts Council, the Contemporary Arts Society, and regional collections in England, as well as private collections in the UK, France and the Netherlands.

Abstract drawings in mixed media and the “Anatomy series” of suspended galvanised wire sculptures form the main body of his most recent work made 2000-2020.  These were exhibited in a trilogy of shows which he titled “Silent Notation” (2011), “Notations – between drawing and sculpture (2017), and “Notations – passages, intervals” (2022). The survey show “Matt Rugg, Early and Late Works” celebrated the return of his work to the New Art Centre in 2022-2023.

“Matt Rugg, Connecting Form”, the first major retrospective of Rugg’s work exhibited at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle 2023-4, was well reviewed. Films about his work screened in exhibitions include ‘Not Wishing to Stand Still’ (2015) and ‘How to be an Artist’ (2023). The monograph “Matt Rugg, The Many Languages of Sculpture” by Michael Bird with Harriet Sutcliffe was published by Lund Humphries in 2023.

Rugg’s work occupies a distinctive space somewhere between abstract sculpture, painting and drawing, in a language uniquely his own.