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Matthew Collings (born 1955) is a British art critic, writer, broadcaster, and artist. He is married to Emma Biggs, with whom he collaborates on art works.
Collings wrote and presented documentary films for the BBC on individual artists, including Donald Judd, Georgia O'Keeffe and Willem de Kooning, as well as broader historical subjects such as Hitler's "Degenerate art" exhibition, art looted in the Second World War by Germany and Russia, Situationism, Spain's post-Franco art world and the rise of the Cologne art scene.
After leaving the BBC, Collings wrote Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst, which humorously chronicled the rise of the Young British Art (YBA) movement. Published in 1997 by 21, a new company founded by David Bowie, among a group of others, Blimey! was described by Artforum magazine as "…one of the best-selling contemporary-art books ever". (Kate Bush on the YBA Sensation, Artforum, 2004). The article went on to say that Collings "invented the perfect voice to complement YBA: He makes an impact without (crucially) ever appearing to try too hard." The following year, Collings wrote and presented the Channel 4 TV series This is Modern Art, which won him a BAFTA (2000), among other awards.
Collings wrote and presented a Channel 4 series in 2003 about the "painterly" stream of Old Master painting, called Matt's Old Masters. A book by the same title accompanied the series. Further Channel 4 series by Collings included Impressionism: Revenge of the Nice (2004) and The Me Generations: Self Portraits, (2005). Between 1997 and 2005, Collings presented the Channel 4 TV programme on the Turner Prize.
In 2007, he wrote and presented the Channel 4 TV series This is Civilisation. This is Civilisation In 2009, he appeared on the BBC2 programme School of Saatchi, a reality TV show for newly trained UK artists.
In October 2010, he wrote and presented a BBC2 series called Renaissance Revolution, in which he discussed three Renaissance paintings: Raphael's Madonna del Prato; Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights; and Piero della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ. In 2014, Collings wrote and presented a 90-minute documentary for BBC4 on abstract art: The Rules of Abstraction considered early modernist beginnings by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, and others, as well as contemporary continuities, ranging from Fiona Rae to El Anatsui. In the same year, Collings appeared in Frederick Wiseman's documentary National Gallery, composing and rehearsing a piece-to-camera on Turner's The Fighting Temeraire, for the documentary Turner's Thames (2012), which Collings wrote and presented for BBC4.
Since 2015, he has been the regular art critic for the Evening Standard, replacing Brian Sewell, who died that year.
Collings' ongoing series of drawings of an "alternative art history", begun in 2020, has been a commercial success, with many thousands sold on Instagram. Waldemar Januszczak, the art critic for The Sunday Times, reviewed Collings' solo exhibition at Handel Street Projects in London in late 2025. He called it "the liveliest show displaying in the capital" and expressed a hope that it would be nominated for the Turner Prize. Waldemar Januszczak, Sunday Times, October 27, 2025.
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