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Swimming an Itch is an exhibition of new works by British artists Matt Antoniak and Phil Frankland at Convent, Ghent. The show is a culmination of an ongoing conversation between the two artists – discussing painterly history, material encounters and quotidian ephemera – and brings together paintings, drawings and textile works made over the past year in an installation at Convent and at locations across the city of Ghent.
TitleSwimming an Itch
Artists Matt Antoniak, Phil Frankland Dates15.11.2025 – 21.12.2025Location CONVENT Space for Contemporary Art, Ghent, BELink Click here
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Antoniak and Frankland are both painters deeply interested in the subject of painting itself – its history, the malleability of the medium, and the tropes within it. On the face of it, each produces very visually different works, but they find common ground in their approaches towards reference material, archiving and appropriation. For each artist, the reevaluation of the cast-off and the overlooked is central to their respective practices.
Antoniak is a collector and archivist of various lost and forgotten ephemera, often using this material in his work as a way to explore his interest in chance, and agency in painting. For the past few years, he has been collecting lost coins found in public – both at home and abroad. The majority were found discarded on the floor, but also in bars, airports, and in the cushioned crevices of seating. In Swimming an Itch, Antoniak presents a new body of works scattered across the floorspace of the gallery, made from a selection of these coins. Removed from their original context, and devoid of worth as currency, the works are re-presented as an exploration of value in a late-stage capitalist society. Enlarged in scale, the symbology and iconography depicted on the faces gain new meanings as ways to maintain political and historic ideologies. At a time when cash is in rapid decline as a medium of exchange, and the effect this can have on various levels of society, Antoniak’s paintings-cum-sculptures riff with ideas of hierarchy, artistic worth and markets.
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For Frankland, the germination of an idea and an artworks final rendering are rarely a direct correlation. Instead, he is open and game to follow new trajectories, with each work following the meandering path of the artist’s own existence. Works in the exhibition are made on receipts kept in a wallet, and the debris of plants accumulate on the surface of works made in the artist’s garden. Material encounters play a large part in his practice, and ideas around tactility and physicality abound. Paintings are rendered stiffly on aluminium panels, or hang loosely as fabric collages, or on delicately stitched sheets of paper. The accumulation of information that gather in Frankland’s works can be straightforward and banal - with readymade objects and found prints affixed to the surface. Whilst at other times, the true narratives within the work can become buried and abstracted under dense layers of pigment and paint.
Through dealing with this contemporary detritus, Swimming an Itch offers no grand statements or binary answers to the vagaries of the world, but showcases works that are the by-products of a continued attempt to visually untangle the complex knots of life.