In “On an Overgrown Path,” Matt Saunders Traverses the Space Between Mediums

The evocative title of Matt Saunders’s latest exhibition, “On an Overgrown Path,” alludes to key concepts explored in the Cambridge- and Berlin-based artist’s work: indeterminacy, interwoven categories, and how prior cultural moments reach us in the present. Across the works in the exhibition, on view at New York’s Marian Goodman Gallery until August 7, Saunders revels in layered technical processes that compellingly trouble the boundaries between painting, printmaking, photography, and film. Hence, he performs the characteristic effects of one medium or technique with another, which arguably constitutes a kind of material “drag.” His subjects are often once-iconic figures who conjure bygone eras and their mediated preservation by way of translation to video or audio recording. Indeed, “On an Overgrown Path” was originally the title of a piano cycle by Czech composer Leoš Janáček.  The titular phrase “popped out” to Saunders, when he encountered it decades ago on an LP in a record store bargain bin.¹

The show extends over two galleries, the second sectioned off into two parts. The first gallery features traditionally hung figurative and landscape works. Days (2026), one of the most striking works in the gallery, is a triptych comprised of chiaroscuro views of actress Carole Bouquet; her face and shoulders emerge from a dark, ambiguous space (the images originate from Werner Schroeter’s 1981 film Tag der Idioten [Day of the Idiots]). Floods of cyan, yellow ochre, and pink dapple the surface and partially veil the three shots of Bouquet. The artwork epitomizes Saunders’s complex material productions. He generated Days by painting the film stills in oil on voile, which he then placed over photosensitive paper and exposed in a darkroom, further filtering the enlarger’s light through watercolor on plastic. He laid these prints next to similarly sized sheets of drafting film (smooth, translucent, material often used for technical drawings), upon which he painted resonant marks, attempting to match precisely the colors that emerged in the photographic process. He flipped the painted drafting film and dragged it across the photo, transferring subtle smears and peaks to the otherwise flat surface. It is difficult to parse where we find photography mimicking painting and vice versa.

In the same gallery, swirling, smoky marks in vivid greens, blues, yellows, and purples comprise Plein Air 1, 2, and 3 (2026). All are unique photographic prints that contain the characteristic indexes of handmade creation: traces of a brush manipulating a liquid medium. Their title references methods of painting outdoors made famous by the Impressionists. While they initially appear abstract, on closer inspection, tree trunks in the white of the paper emerge out of the colored flows. Saunders provides a representational key to unlock their contents. Flooded Woods (2026) is a pine green and black composition derived from a photograph Saunders took in the Canadian wilderness. While painterly, it is clearly a landscape.

When I spoke with Saunders, he shared that he cultivated a knowledge of cinema in his twenties; citations of both underground and classic films abound in his output. Temporal suspensions or mediated extensions, however, distance audiences from this source material. In the Marian Goodman exhibition, hand-painted depictions of twentieth-century German silver screen icons, transformed into the black, white, and gray tones of gelatin silver photography, intersperse the more vibrant woodlands described above.

The exhibition’s second space is split: One section has a sound and video installation that spills from a screen to the walls; the other contains a row of prints and photographs. These include two renderings of Andy Warhol’s Factory superstar Candy Darling as well as a suite of prints of Jane Birkin. For the latter, Saunders “misused” photogravure, stopping out areas of the image to form gaps that manifest as expressive embossed passages. He added more density, evoking the colored papers found in the photographs of Medardo Rosso, with layers of printed wood in different hues.

The vanguard filmmaker Jack Smith is important to Saunders, who was especially taken with a scratchy VHS copy of Smith’s Normal Love (1963) he acquired in his twenties. Normal Love is a nonnarrative film with striking and sensual visuals; it alternates between shots of characters, some in drag, lounging and frolicking in the woods and the drag performer Mario Montez as a glamorous mermaid lounging in a pool of milk. The film does not merely feature plays with gender; in Smith’s shots, one material often seems to masquerade as another. Smith haunts Saunders’s output and the artist explicitly acknowledges him in an expressive photograph in the exhibition.

In the exhibition’s titular work, a two-channel video installation, a fragment of Normal Love’s soundtrack is remixed with Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path (1900–11). The music is dense and energetic and matches well with the flashes and floods of abstract color in the videos: One channel depicts a landscape, while the other features figures as well as pure marks. Saunders made them by combining scans of the drafting film he uses as negatives or to transfer paint in his studio (as in Days)—effectively creating them from his own cutting room floor (also a tactic of Smith’s). The result is an immersive audio-visual cinematic experience produced from painted marks that were originally made to mimic elements of photography. Across the works in Saunders’s show, then, we see material “drag” akin to Smith’s: various mediums play the role of other visual languages and techniques,  aesthetically effacing clear boundaries between them. Just as iconic stars can be channeled and revived in the hands of drag performers, Saunders’s layered technical processes give his source materials life anew.

—1 Matt Saunders, in conversation with the author, July 15, 2026.

“Matt Saunders: On an Overgrown Path” is on view through August 7, 2026, at Marian Goodman Gallery, 385 Broadway, New York, NY.