a two-person exhibition of new work by
Julia Clift and Matthew Colaizzo
January 13 – February 28, 2025
Exhibition reception and events TBA
About the Exhibition
Windows and Barricades brings together paintings and drawings by Philadelphia-based artists Matthew Colaizzo and Julia Clift for the first time. The two met in 2020, when Clift invited Colaizzo to participate in her curatorial debut Seeing the Anthropocene, a group exhibition that took place across multiple Philadelphia venues in the fall of 2023. Windows and Barricades further develops the conversation between Colaizzo and Clift as two studio artists with shared concerns and similar formal sensibilities. Both artists explore tensions between ecology and the built environment, interrogating human desires for control in a world of entropy and impermanence. The artists also share an abiding interest in navigational and perceptual barriers. Walls, barricades, windows and screens abound in their paintings and drawings, compelling viewers to peer through filters and meager gaps, and ultimately prompting reflection on the forces that shape how we see and move about in the world. While the works in this exhibition all allude to critical issues like humankind’s hubris, Colaizzo and Clift eschew didacticism and maintain a tone of playful invention.
About the Artists
Matthew Colaizzo is a Philadelphia-based artist and teacher. Through printmaking, drawing, and painting, his work explores our relationship to physical landscapes and questions conventions of boundaries, land organization, accessibility, and private property. He’s been an artist in residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center (CO) and Soaring Gardens (PA), with notable exhibitions at The Print Center New York, University of Texas in Austin, and Temple University Rome. Colaizzo also founded and runs his own fine art framing business in Philadelphia, where he’s worked with multiple institutions and artists including Locks Gallery, The Print Center, and the Maguire Art Museum. He received his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and his BFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Julia Clift is a Philadelphia-based artist whose work reflects on current American culture, her own mediated perception of reality, and humankind’s fraught relationship with the natural world. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited across the United States, in locations such as Massey Klein Gallery, Pentimenti Gallery, and Arnot Art Museum. She is a current faculty member at Penn State Abington and previously taught at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Maryland Institute College of Art, and West Chester University. At Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, Julia co-created and continues to teach the Visualizing Anatomy program, which helps first-year medical students understand anatomy on a deeper level through visual art exercises. Julia received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Google Map
215-881-7600