Christopher Knowles at Office Baroque

Artist: Christopher Knowles

Venue: Office Baroque, Brussels, Belgium

Date: February 20 – April 9, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Office Baroque, Brussels

Office Baroque is very pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Christopher Knowles at our midtown gallery on Ravensteinstraat 44 Rue Ravenstein in Brussels.

Christopher Knowles (born 1959, USA) is an artist as well as a poet. This exhibition zooms in on his oil marker paintings and features a selection of works that were made between 1990 and 2014. Knowles’ subjects are varied including objects, texts, buildings, portraits and sporting events. What unifies his paintings is their search for a true self in a changing world. At the crux of this show are subjects identifying with collective memory, casting ordinary people as well as superstars in vibrant colours in search for moments that define our identity and shape our lives. Compositionally his paintings are dense, covering the canvas from top to bottom. Space is flattened out, often merging figures with backgrounds to reveal reality both as the product of an unifying logic as much as forging a critical, hybrid view on the world and its versions of truth.

Christopher Knowles currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He will have a solo at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston in 2017. Past solo exhibitions include Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Fonoteca Nacional de México, Mexico; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid; The Louvre Museum, Paris and Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

His poetry has been published in a variety of magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and Interview Magazine. His works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam and numerous other international institutions and private collections.