Chris Engman USA, b. 1978

Chris Engman was born in 1978 in Seattle, Washington, USA, and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his BFA in Photography from the University of Washington in 2003 and his MFA from the USC Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California, in 2013. He has received Grants for Artist Projects from Artist Trust in 2004, 2007, and 2010, as well as a Fellowship Award in 2004.

Engman's practice is rooted in a sustained philosophical inquiry into the nature of perception, time, and photographic truth. At the origin of each work lies an idea, a concept, and extensive research. His process is laborious and deliberate: he constructs temporary installations in remote desert landscapes along the west coast of the United States, or within the controlled environment of his studio, building elaborate structures from simple materials such as sand, plywood, rope, and concrete blocks. These are photographed with precision and then abandoned. The resulting images exploit the camera's capacity for deception with exacting intelligence. In Three Squares (2006), only one of the depicted forms is actually a square; the others are a rectangle and a trapezium, an illusion created entirely through camera positioning. In Landscape for Candace (2015), produced in his Berlin studio in Kreuzberg, a view of a studio interior with a tree at its centre appears straightforward until closer inspection reveals it to be an illusionistic construction in which photocopied elements have been assembled and re-photographed. The title references Candace "Caddy" Compson from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, whose complex narrative structure of layered inner monologues mirrors the stratified nature of Engman's own work. Floorplan (2021) continues this investigation into spatial illusion and the constructed nature of visual experience. As Engman has written of his practice: "My work takes the human condition as its central theme and examines the most fundamental of issues: the inexplicable fact of our existence, the ungraspable experience of time, and the illusive and unknowable nature of reality."

Engman's work is held in significant public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; the Seattle Art Museum; the Portland Art Museum; the Orange County Art Museum, California; the City of Seattle Collection; the Microsoft Collection, Seattle; the Manfred Leist Collection, Munich; the Ines Musumeci Greco Collection, Rome; and the Sir Elton John Collection, London. Solo institutional exhibitions include presentations at the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, California, and the Weston Art Gallery at the Cincinnati Arts Association. His work has been reviewed in The Seattle Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Visual Art Source, among other publications.

Chris Engman participated in the artist-in-residence program at 68projects by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin in the summer of 2015, working in Berlin for two months. The residency resulted in Landscapes: Berlin–L.A. Trilogy I, a solo exhibition presented at 68projects, Fasanenstrasse 68, Berlin, from 27 November 2015 to 23 January 2016. The exhibition brought together photographs produced in his Kreuzberg studio alongside works made on the west coast of the United States, many of them in desert landscapes, juxtaposing two distinct geographies within a single coherent visual inquiry. An artist talk with Engman and art historian Julia Rosenbaum took place at 68projects on 28 November 2015. In 2024, Engman was included in Berlin on My Mind, the group exhibition at 68projects by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin celebrating ten years of the gallery's artist-in-residence program. His practice continues to probe the limits of photographic representation, asking with quiet insistence what it means to see, and what it means to believe what we see.