Collection: Somewhere in Time

Chris is an award-winning artist born in Grimsby, now based in Walthamstow. After graduating from Norwich School of Art he completed his postgraduate studies at The Royal Academy of Arts in 1997. He has since exhibited widely and is featured in many collections, including The National Portrait Gallery, London.

Close attention to light, shadow and line underpins Chris’s practice, connecting prolific past works in portraiture to current re-imaginings of houses. Not as different as they might seem, this departure is simply a redirection of his meticulous painterly approach. It is now through architecture and landscape that Chris tells stories. Look carefully and you will see signs of inhabitance and history too. The names of the paintings, a clue to the people who live beyond the walls and windows.  

In this new collection Chris interprets Hackney and East London buildings. Bending reality, he alters the lens through which we view them. The displacement of the observed to the imagined gives the works a haunting and compelling power. We are transported in time and space, the world familiar, yet strange.

This series marks a new chapter in his practice. Just as the black and white cat traces Chris’s steps, the spirit of Surrealism has quietly followed his paintbrush for many years. We see his interest in the uncanny and the overlooked progress to a new level of visual playfulness, René Magritte’s influence louder than ever. Chris wanders further into the mysterious, unexpected and unconventional. We perhaps feel a little like Christopher Reeve’s time-traveller in the 1980 film Somewhere in Time. Disorientated, but captivated by exquisite beauty.