Matthew Olivier
Artist and Writer in Toronto, Canada
Matthew Olivier (b. 1991) is a Canadian visual artist based in Toronto, working across painting, installation, and writing.
His practice stands in two lineages at once: European figurative painting, and the readymade of Marcel Duchamp — extended, in Olivier's work, to the algorithm itself. His ongoing installation, Codex Algorithm, treats the social feed as a found object: manuscripts of algorithmic essays on historic paintings, commissioned by institutions including a Trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Government of Flanders, and Louvre Abu Dhabi, with individual essays for Dior, the Munch Museum, M+ Hong Kong, MSK Gent, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Palazzo Maffei, and thatgamecompany.
His first book, The Art of Reading Art (Smith Street Books, October 6, 2026), reads over one hundred of history's great paintings.