Comics author and critic Frank Santoro once wrote: “Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce is possibly the most important serialized comics of the post-Ware era”. But Multiforce is even more than that: as Brinkman’s entire artistic production – ranging over comics, painting, and music –, it is also a unique way of conceiving the fantasy genre: extreme, hallucinatory, subversive in its stylistic choices, yet harmonious

From 1995 to 2001, Mat Brinkman was part of Fort Thunder, an occupied former factory in Providence, Rhode Island, used as a venue for underground events as well as a living and working space for a group of artists. Deeply affecting the North American music and art scene, Fort Thunder proposed an alternative to the explicit literary spirit of graphic novels and the experience of comix. Fort Thunder took inspiration from art brut, American surrealism, videogame culture, and punk music – it was an avant-garde movement combining highbrow experimental art to a playful and iconoclastic recycling of pop imagery.
Of all Fort Thunder artists, Mat Brinkman is the shadiest: for years he refused to reprint his comics or expose his works.
Until now.
BilBOlbul hosts Mat Brinkman’s first ever solo exhibition: an incredible and hallucinating journey starting from the underground scene and leading to art galleries and mainstream culture.

with Mat Brinkman, Ratigher
moderator Alessio Trabacchini

Mat Brinkman was born in Texas. He studied arts, printmaking and sculpting, and became a comic artist who depicts lots of monsters, as can be seen in his comic Teratoid Heights, published by Highwater Books. Mat Brinkman is a founding member of the artist group Fort Thunder. Other artists of the group are Erin Rosenthal, Leif Goldberg, Brian Chippendale, Jim Drain, Paul Lyons and Brian Ralph.
He is an electronic musician and has recorded with the bands Mindflayer and Forcefield. He often cooperates with Neil Burke on posters and comics, among others for the Kramer’s Ergot anthology.