Matthew Benedict is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His painting revolves around storytelling and the construction of visual narratives, through scenes in which history, memory, and imagination intertwine.

Benedict works primarily in gouache on wood and paper, employing a deliberately flat and graphic language reminiscent of nineteenth-century illustration and didactic painting. His compositions draw on archives, historical photographs, and elements of American popular iconography, which he transforms to create scenes rich in historical, mythological, and religious references.

Rather than depicting specific events, his paintings function as fragments of incomplete stories that the viewer is invited to reconstruct. In them, time and history become malleable materials, giving rise to worlds in which the real and the fictional, the

documentary and the imagined, coexist. His work thus explores questions of memory, transformation, heroism, and the construction of the narratives that shape our perception of the past.

Benedict studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, in 1991, received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Eugene Lang College, The New School, in New York. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in cities including New York, Zurich, Stockholm, Madrid, and Wuppertal, and is held in public collections such as those of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the NASA Art Program. He has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.