Chris Hood (b. 1984, Atlanta, USA) is an American painter whose work moves between abstraction and figuration, using the visual speeds of digital culture to test how images become memory, atmosphere, and identity. Hood builds paintings from collisions: fragments of counterculture, art history, and mass-media imagery pass through processes of translation until they register as unstable scenes, part landscape and part mindscape. In the series Split Pictures (2019), motifs blur, fracture, and reconfigure across the picture plane, establishing a layered pictorial space where surfaces read like screens, wounds, and windows at once.
Hood’s compositions often hold a double perspective, pairing expansive, cosmic or mountainous settings with intimate details such as cracks, splats, and cuts, so that perception shifts between distance and proximity. Through this oscillation, Chris Hood foregrounds themes of identity, memory, and loss while insisting on painting as a contemporary image technology. Chris Hood presented Split Pictures (22 November 2019 to 18 January 2020) at 68projects as the concluding exhibition of his 2019 Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V. Berlin fellowship and 68projects residency, in collaboration with KORNFELD Galerie Berlin.
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Magic Mountain, 2019 Sold
Chris Hood (b. 1984, Atlanta, USA) holds a BFA from Georgia State University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. After completing his studies, he worked in New York before relocating his studio permanently to Los Angeles.
Hood’s paintings unfold as acts of translation. He draws on images from counterculture, art history, and mass media, then pushes them through painterly procedures that destabilize recognition. The result is a mediated reality in which clichés and visual cues collide, fracture, and reconfigure, generating pictorial spaces that feel simultaneously physical and psychological. His work frequently stages a double register: an expansive field that evokes landscape, cosmos, or architectural depth, alongside a closer zone of surface incidents, where cracks, splats, stains, and cuts become carriers of meaning. Through this oscillation, Hood addresses identity, memory, and loss, not as illustrations of narrative but as conditions embedded in how an image appears, erodes, and returns.
The series Split Pictures (2019) crystallizes these concerns. Developed in Berlin, the works propose “settings” that operate on two levels: environments the eye can enter, and theoretical spaces shaped by perception and personhood. Hood establishes tensions between creation and ending, lightness and heaviness, and uses recurring icons that stretch, dissolve, and collide, serving as unstable anchors for interpretation. A reverse stain technique contributes to the series’ ambiguity, allowing motifs to emerge as echoes across layered grounds, fading at one edge of the image while intensifying at another. Alongside the large paintings, works on paper extend the project through watercolor, ink, and resin, where fluidity and speed support a more direct generation of composition and character.
In autumn 2019, Chris Hood lived and worked in Berlin as the 2019 Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House e. V. Berlin Fellow and resident artist at 68projects, the project space and residency platform by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin. The residency culminated in his first solo exhibition in Berlin, Chris Hood – Split Pictures, presented at 68projects from 22 November 2019 to 18 January 2020. Hood later appeared in the anniversary exhibition Berlin on my Mind. Celebrating 10 Years of Artistic Residency at 68projects by KORNFELD, on view from 21 June to 24 August 2024.
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Berlin on my Mind. Celebrating 10 Years of Artistic Residency at 68projects by KORNFELD – Groupshow
21 Jun - 24 Aug 2024 68projectsARTISTSRead more
Dawit Abebe, Olasunkanmi Akomolehin, Cristina BanBan, Yevgeniya Baras, William Bradley, Giorgio Celin, Chris Engman, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Seong Joon Hong, Chris Hood, Michael John Kelly, Alexander Kroll, Doron Langberg, Sandeep Mukherjee, Jennifer Packer, Adrianne Rubenstein, Kyungmi Shin, Levan Songulashvili, Panos Tsagaris, Rachel Eulena Williams & Liat Yossifor
INFORMATION
On 21 June, we will showcase 21 works by the 21 artists who have been our guests as artists-in-residence over the past 10 years of 68projects by KORNFELD – with ‘Berlin on My Mind’. We are celebrating our 10 years with 68projects by KORNFELD and the 10 years of our artist-in-residence program, but also our future, which we hope to keep creating in Berlin. In Berlin, international artists look for new perspectives, a place where ideas mingle
Opening: June 21 2024, 6 pm
Exhibition: June 21 – August 24 2024, Tue – Sat, 11 am – 6 pm
68projects by KORNFELD, Fasanenstr. 68, 10719 Berlin -
Chris Hood – Split Pictures
22 Nov 2019 - 18 Jan 2020 68projectsIn American artist Chis Hood's series: ''Split Pictures'' he continues to investigate artist's ongoing interests in cultural entropy and reconfiguration. Combining traditional techniques with the languages of digital territories, his work often features images culled from counterculture, art history, and mass media rendered abstract by translation. Focused on themes of identity, memory and loss, Hood explores within his works the wider role of images and contemporary painting reflected through a unique understanding of abstraction in which personal and social imagery collide in the 21st century.Read more
