Matt Hope was born in Hammersmith, London in 1976 where he spent the first twenty years of his life. In 1994 after completing tertiary college he attended Chelsea school of Art in London. As a teenager he spent his spare time mixing electronic music and building home made speaker systems. The first of these speaker systems were built from discarded furniture, wooden shuttering and electronic parts retrieved from derelict industrial sites.
During this period Hope began to participate in the production of underground warehouse parties with these sound systems taking place in the many disused industrial sites across London, following in Paris and Prague performing as a DJ with other members of a loosely organized group known as Vox Populi.
Having completed a foundation course at Chelsea Art school he attended Winchester school of Art in Hampshire, UK graduating in 1999 with a (1) st class degree in Fine Art Sculpture. At Winchester he built many constructions including a stand-alone noise generator, industrial size metal waste bin and giant modular structure.
Between study he worked commercially as a structural welder (requiring special training and qualification gained at The Welding Institute, Cambridge UK in 1999). He then gained valuable practical experience in modern fabrication techniques, on site fitting and the rigging of large structural elements weighing many tons. During this period Hope spent his spare time learning CAD, visualization and drafting.
Hope went on to study Fine Art obtaining an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, working with professor and Art historian, John Welchman, Artists Ruben Ortiz Torrez and Natalie Jeremijenko. During his study at UCSD he was awarded a fellowship from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) where he created from blue prints an extensive 3D computer model of the new 200,000 sq ft facility built at the UCSD campus.
Hope continued to organize events and happenings akin to the earlier sound systems during his time at UCSD. Alongside fellow MFA candiates Jon Phillips and Nataniel Clark they performed under the name Mesh FM, producing projects such as A month of compaction, Realtime and Brainstorm -a homemade super computer. His thesis project at UCSD ‘Hornmassive’ was the sum total of two years work, designing, calculating, fabricating and machining the hundreds of parts necessary. The enormous speaker system was first exhibited at the Supersonic show at Arts center Pasadena in Los Angeles. Hope has continued to design and build both conventional and unconventional speaker systems up to this day
Hope has worked full time as an Artist since graduating from UCSD, represented by ACE gallery Los Angeles for which he is mounting his first large scale solo exhibition due to open in 2009 at the new 30,000 sq m ACE museum space in Los Angeles. The exhibition comprises of 300 drawings, 40 sculptures and 2 installations, ranging in scale from a few microns to the largest at 34 meters in length. The projects utilize a wide array of ready made objects, technological systems, industrial machines and raw materials such as granite boulders, coal, crude oil a jeep Cherokee realtime stock prices and Satellite imaging. Matt Hope solo exhibition opens in winter of 2009. Hope has spent the last year designing and fabricating over 10 large scale projects in northern china destined for his solo exhibition in Los Angeles.