Matt Josef
Tulsa, OK
Matt Josef is a Western artist in Tulsa blending traditional Western imagery with a modern, layered style.
MessageCollection: Repetition Series
Repetition Series
The Repetition Series is built around recurring images, marks, and symbols: riders, buffalo, birds, skulls, shoes, portraits, silhouettes, and fragments of Western and pop culture iconography.
In these paintings, repetition becomes a way of studying memory, identity, movement, and myth. The same image appears again and again, but never exactly the same way. Each return carries a shift in color, scale, texture, pressure, or mood. What starts as a recognizable form becomes rhythm, atmosphere, and emotional pattern.
These works connect directly to Matt Josef’s larger studio practice at Rodeo House, where painting, place, storytelling, and visual culture overlap. The repeated figures feel both familiar and unstable, like images pulled from memory, advertising, old photographs, rodeo history, road culture, and the American interior. They become icons, then ghosts, then patterns.
From a distance, the paintings often read with bold graphic impact. Up close, they reveal layered surfaces, drips, drawing, erasure, and imperfect human marks. The repetition is not mechanical. It is physical, intuitive, and alive.
This collection is for collectors drawn to work with rhythm, symbolism, movement, and a strong visual pulse. The Repetition Series holds a space between abstraction and image, between nostalgia and disruption, between the recognizable and the remembered.
Powered by Artwork Archive