Matt Baumgardner’s early-career artworks from the 1980s are large, imposing, and expressionistically wild—vivid alien topographies created from layered paint, tar, and cloth. But these early works look almost nothing like the small, subtle, metaphysical abstractions that later brought him renown in the 1990s and 2000s. He seemed to finish the decade as a completely different artist. What happened? Why had his early style changed so dramatically as he entered his mature period? New Magic in a Dusty World explores that transformation.