Abstract

The Abstract collection reflects Matt Josef’s ongoing study of gesture, movement, color, and the physical act of painting.

Early in his career, Josef became drawn to Abstract Expressionism and the work of artists such as Pollock, de Kooning, Picasso, and others who treated painting as a living, physical language. That influence continues to shape his studio practice today, whether abstraction becomes the foundation of a background, a passage within a larger image, or the entire subject of the work.

For Josef, abstraction is a way to loosen control and let the painting lead. Through scraping, dripping, drawing, staining, erasing, and rebuilding, new marks emerge organically. The process becomes a conversation with the surface, where color, texture, accident, and instinct reveal what comes next.

These works range from quiet and atmospheric to raw, layered, and explosive. Figures, landscapes, symbols, and fragments may appear, but they remain open to interpretation, shifting between image, memory, and pure mark-making.

The Abstract collection is for collectors drawn to movement, material, mood, and discovery. Each painting invites repeated looking, offering a record of experimentation, intuition, and the belief that the paint always teaches.

Bikes

The Bikes collection brings Matt Josef’s lifelong passion for cycling into the studio.

Since childhood, bikes have been a constant source of freedom, movement, challenge, and joy. A few years ago, Josef began incorporating that passion into his painting practice, exploring the bicycle not just as an object, but as a symbol of grit, rhythm, endurance, and spirit.

For Josef, the cyclist and the cowboy share a similar mythology. Both are shaped by motion, discipline, solitude, risk, and heart. The bike becomes a modern-day iron horse, carrying the rider through effort, terrain, speed, and self-discovery.

These works connect cycling culture with the larger visual language of Josef’s practice: Western imagery, repetition, bold color, layered surfaces, and expressive mark-making. Riders appear in motion, suspended between control and chaos, strength and vulnerability, grind and grace.

Bikes is an ongoing collection, and Josef plans to continue exploring this subject through new paintings, commissions, and collaborations. For collectors who love cycling, movement, endurance, and the spirit of the ride, this series celebrates the heartbeat inside both rider and machine.

Equine / Horse

Horses have been part of Matt Josef’s life since childhood, growing up around them in Purcell, Oklahoma.

This collection began in a pivotal season after returning from his Taos, New Mexico studio in 2014. At the time, Josef was focused primarily on abstract and floral works. When business slowed almost to a halt, he found himself back at the ranch, trying to figure out how to get back to Taos. Instead of forcing the next step, he began to accept that he was there for a reason.

One day, he walked out into the pasture to spend time with the horses and remembers asking them, “Would it be okay if I painted you guys?” He went back into his barn studio and began painting horses over a large abstract canvas. One painting led to another, then another. After sharing the work online, inquiries came in almost overnight from around the country.

That moment changed everything.

The horse paintings helped shift Josef into being recognized as a Western artist, opening a path that continues to shape his work today. While he moves freely between series, styles, and subjects, horses remain one of his favorite and most meaningful subjects.

These works carry movement, spirit, memory, and connection. They are not just paintings of horses, but records of a turning point, a return home, and the quiet force of listening to what the land, the studio, and the animals had to teach.

Icons

The Icons collection explores cultural figures, musicians, athletes, cowboys, rebels, performers, and mythic personalities through Matt Josef’s loose, layered studio language.

These are not traditional portraits. They are painted through memory, attitude, distortion, and atmosphere, turning familiar figures into symbols of culture, nostalgia, grit, humor, and personal mythology.

Drawing from music, film, sports, Western imagery, fashion, and American storytelling, the series carries Josef’s signature use of color, text, pattern, drips, and expressive mark-making. Some works feel bold and graphic, while others feel faded, intimate, or half-remembered, like an old poster, a song, or a photograph from the road.

Icons is an ongoing series, and new works continue to be added. Requests and commissions are welcome for collectors interested in a specific figure, subject, or personal icon.

Large Works: 36" x 48" and Larger

These large-scale paintings are built to hold a room.

Ranging from around 36" x 48" and larger works, this collection is made for collectors, designers, galleries, and spaces that call for a true statement piece. At this scale, the paintings become more than images on a wall. They create atmosphere, presence, and a focal point that changes the way a space feels.

Each work carries the raw energy, layered color, and emotional rhythm of Matt Josef’s studio practice. The larger canvases allow the compositions to expand with more movement, depth, and visual force, giving the viewer room to enter the painting rather than simply observe it.

These pieces are ideal for homes, offices, hospitality spaces, galleries, and architectural interiors where art is meant to anchor the room. Whether placed above a sofa, in an entryway, behind a dining table, in a conference room, or as the centerpiece of a private collection, these works are designed to command attention while continuing to reveal new details over time.

For those seeking a bold, original painting with scale, impact, and soul, this collection represents the strongest statement works available from the studio.

Portraits are where my work began.

Before the larger bodies of work, before the experiments with materials, scale, abstraction, and storytelling, I was drawn to the human face. Portraiture gave me a way to study presence, personality, memory, and emotion. It became a doorway into everything else I would eventually explore as an artist.

Over the years, my approach to portraits has shifted, loosened, stretched, and evolved. Some pieces are direct and intimate. Others are layered, expressive, experimental, or somewhere in between. This collection brings together portraits from different seasons of my practice, including early works, recent pieces, and new explorations that continue to pull me back into the subject.

I still love portraits. I love the quiet challenge of trying to capture not just how someone looks, but something of what they carry. This collection is a living archive of that pursuit: old, new, and everything in between.

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.

Small and Mid-Sized Works: Under 36" x 48"

These smaller and mid-sized paintings offer an accessible way to begin or grow a collection.

Created for new collectors, intimate spaces, and rooms that need a meaningful original work without the scale of a large statement piece, this collection includes paintings under 36" x 48". These works carry the same energy, layered color, and emotional presence found in Matt Josef’s larger paintings, but in a size that fits more easily into homes, offices, studios, and personal spaces.

Smaller works are ideal for bedrooms, hallways, reading corners, shelves, gallery walls, offices, and quiet architectural moments where a painting can create warmth, rhythm, and personality. They are also a strong choice for collectors who are purchasing original art for the first time or looking to add a more personal piece to an existing collection.

At this scale, the paintings invite a closer kind of viewing. Details, marks, texture, and color relationships become more intimate, creating a direct connection between the work and the viewer.

For those looking for an original painting with character, presence, and collectability in a more flexible size, this collection is a natural place to begin.

Western Art

The Western Art collection grew out of a turning point in Matt Josef’s studio practice.

After returning from his Taos, New Mexico studio in 2014, Josef began painting horses at the ranch in Purcell, Oklahoma. What started as a quiet conversation with the animals in the pasture quickly opened into something much larger. Those first horse paintings brought attention from collectors around the country and shifted Josef into the contemporary Western artist he is known as today.

This collection brings together the major threads of his work: the portrait artist he was in the beginning, the abstract expressionist language he studied and developed, and the Western imagery that became his primary visual identity. Horses, cowboys, riders, buffalo, Native imagery, open skies, grit, memory, and myth all move through the paintings.

Rather than treating Western art as nostalgia, Josef approaches it as a living language. His work blends recognizable Western subjects with layered color, loose drawing, expressive mark-making, repetition, text, and abstraction. The result is work that feels rooted in place but still contemporary, personal, and evolving.

Western Art remains the core of Josef’s artistic identity and continues to expand across series, scales, and styles. These paintings carry the spirit of the land, the studio, the ranch, and the road, forming the foundation of Josef’s ongoing voice as a contemporary Western artist.