Matthew Eskuche, winner of this year’s UrbanGlass Award for New Talent Award, is a rising star.  With recent solo exhibitions including Agristocracy, Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; The United State of America: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Crappiness, The Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, PA; and Dollar Menu: A Fast Food Aesthetic, Sandra Ainsley Gallery, Toronto, Canada, his work has been praised for its conceptual use of glass.

Lauren Rosenblum of Canadian Art magazine wrote:

“In his Toronto exhibition “Dollar Menu: A Fast Food Aesthetic, the Pittsburgh-based glass artist Matthew Eskuche elevates glasswork—a medium traditionally considered as craft—to a form of high art and, while he is at it, also raises the vestiges of consumerism into prized, highly coveted objects. The series is a collection of fast food facsimiles—some of the detritus is intact, some is crushed or shattered, some spills out of garbage cans and some is clustered on and around antique tables and vanities. Comparisons to pop art are inevitable; the work is reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s The Store, for both in that work and in this one, the celebration and criticism of commercial culture is given new weight by grim contemporary consequences of rampant capitalism, globalization, consumption, waste, pollution and climate change.”  

 Images of his work have been published in Craft, Glassline, Glass Art, the Flow, and New Glass Review. His work is in the permanent collections of the Lampwork Glass Museum, Kobe, Japan; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; and Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI.

 http://matteskuche.com/home.html