Mat Collishaw

Matthew “Mat” Collishaw (born 1966 in Nottingham, lives and works in London) is one of the "Young British Artists". Mat Collishaw attended Goldsmiths, University of London (1986-9), alongside Damien Hirst and other YBA artists. He has shown work nationally in many exhibitions including Freeze at Surrey Docks in London, in which Collishaw displayed large scale tiled photographs of a bullet wound in a head. His work uses photography and video. His best known work is “Bullet Hole” which is a closeup photo of what appears to be a bullet hole wound in the scalp of a person's head, mounted on 15 light boxes. Collishaw took the original image from a pathology textbook that actually showed a wound caused by an ice pick. Bullet Hole is now in the collection of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Australia. Collishaw's work was included in “Sensation” at the Royal Academy of Art.
Mat Collishaw typically takes imagery which is at once shocking yet strangely beautiful in order to examine the beguiling nature of photography and the seduction of visual imagery. Collishaw uses contemporary images alongside techniques and styles which are reminiscent of much older art, for example he often utilises a mosaic effect which, while alluding to religious art and Ancient Rome, is also now associated with pixelated digital imagery.
In this way Collishaw brings together a variety of connotations in one piece that is both traditional and contemporary; dichotomies of life and death and attraction and repulsion are central to Collishaw's art which tests our natural responses to disquieting imagery when dressed as sacred, slick or stunning. Known most widely for his photographs and videos, Collishaw's work also includes installation, drawing and painting.