Christopher Schade: BunkerS
Exhibition Dates: september 5 - 30, 2023
Reception: thursday, september 7, 5PM - 8pm
Closing Reception/artist’s talk: saturday, september 30, 4PM - 6pm
Bunker 22, 2021
Bunker 18, 2019
The Painting Center is pleased to present Bunkers by Christopher Schade. For his first solo exhibition as a member of The Painting Center, he is exhibiting all the images in the Bunkers series, which includes 26 mixed media works on paper and 4 oil paintings.
The Bunkers series began with a visit in 2009 to Pointe du Hoc, Normandy. This is where there are the untouched remains of German bunkers, part of the Atlantic Wall, that were shelled by the invading Allied ships on D-Day. Psychologically, Schade is fascinated by the futility of the impulse to guard such a vast coastline inside basically a medieval structure, and by the inherent polymorphic qualities of the landscape. These potent ruins are seemingly ancient in their decay; they are historic, evoking a critical moment in time; and yet they seem otherworldly as they rest in a terrain dotted with impact craters of over twenty feet which resembles a lunar landscape. Through these images he is also exploring the potential of black as a color which defines and confuses form perceptually; by acting simultaneously as a lack of light, graphically as shape, and volumetrically as void and mass. As forms that resist resolution into a single knowable subject, the Bunkers are another manifestation of Schade’s exploration into the ramifications of uncertainty in form. Our ambiguous relationship to these forms and situations is magnified through the shifting vantage points and spaces of each image. In the Bunkers, Schade is also exploring a sense of dread and the recent individual and collective attempts we have made to shelter ourselves from various external threats from the COVID pandemic, political extremism and climate change.
Christopher Schade was born in Austin, Texas and was raised in Austin and in Quirihue, Chile. Schade received his Bachelor of Arts in Art from the University of Texas at Austin in Plan II Honors Humanities and Studio Art in Painting and then received his Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Upon graduation he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
He has had solo and two-person exhibitions at The Painting Center in New York, Kai Matsumiya Gallery in New York, Boston Design Center in Boston, Massachusetts, dberman gallery in Austin, Texas and Conduit Gallery in Dallas, Texas. Group exhibitions in New York City include shows at The Painting Center, Park Place Gallery, Blackburn 20/20, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brian Morris Gallery and GRG gallery, in Massachusetts at VERY, Drive-By Projects, Geoffrey Young Gallery and Sampson Projects Gallery, and in Texas at The Contemporary Austin Jones Center, dberman Gallery and Conduit Gallery. His work is in the flat files of Pierogi Gallery, New York and online in the White Columns' Curated Artist Registry and The Painting Center’s Members Gallery. He has received the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, Blanche E. Colman Award from BNY Mellon, and the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Grant from The Dallas Museum of Art. His work has been written about in Boston Art Review, Interview Magazine, The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Dallas Art Revue, Austin American-Statesman and The Austin Chronicle.
He is a founder of the Artist Lecture Series in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and has curated numerous group shows, most recently “Prime Matter” at the Teckningsmuseet (Museum of Drawings) in Laholm, Sweden. In the spring of 2021, he joined The Painting Center in New York City as a member. He teaches painting and drawing as Associate Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Boston Art and Art History Department. He lives and works in Watertown, Massachusetts.
For more information on the artist, visit: christopherschade.com.
