This institutional recognition has been accompanied by a crasser kind of interest. Wong’s paintings have been acquired by MOMA and the Met. After Wong took his life, the Times proclaimed him “one of the most talented painters of his generation.” Museums began assembling his art into major exhibitions, with one currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario and a retrospective opening this year at the Dallas Museum of Art. “One of the most impressive solo New York debuts I’ve seen in a while,” the critic Jerry Saltz wrote, in 2018. In Wong’s lifetime, his work was heralded-remarkably so, given that he was largely self-taught and spent no more than seven years with a brush in hand. He played with a dizzying array of artistic references, but he shared the early modernists’ conviction that oil on canvas could yield intimate and novel forms of expression. For years, unknown to the other tenants, he came to paint-producing, in a furious outpouring, works of astonishing lyricism, melancholy, whimsy, intelligence, and, perhaps most important, sincerity. Wong’s studio, protected by a metal door and an alarm, is tucked into a corner office on the second floor. One part of the facility is devoted to a manufacturer of industrial lubricants, another to a food-processing company. The squat building that houses Wong’s workspace-which remains as he left it, with barely a brush moved-has more loading docks than doors, and stands before a parking strip that can accommodate eighteen-wheelers. The neighborhood is industrial, but not in an arty way. Matthew Wong, the gifted Canadian painter who died by suicide at the age of thirty-five, just before the pandemic, worked from a studio in Edmonton, on the east side of the North Saskatchewan River. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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