Chris Hood – Split Pictures
In 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.
Resident Artist Chris Hood
68projects and Galerie Kornfeld are pleased to present the first-ever solo exhibition in Berlin of American artist Chris Hood. The Los Angeles–based artist has been living and working in Berlin since October 2019 and presents a selection of his work at the conclusion of his 2019 Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e.V. Berlin fellowship and 68projects residency.
His newest series Split Pictures continues the artist’s ongoing interest in cultural entropy and reconfiguration. Combining traditional techniques with the languages of digital territories, Hood’s work often features images culled from counterculture, art history, and mass media, rendered abstract through translation.
His pictures consist of a kind of mediated reality in which mixing and blending clichés and visual cues generate a new hypnotic sense of reality and space. The series features a group of “settings” that simultaneously depict physical spaces and, on another level, observations of theoretical space—occupied by one’s sense of personhood and perception.
The works consider the viewer experiencing these spaces on two levels: a distant, expansive space occupied by mountainous landscapes, the cosmos, and the idea of mindscape as space, alongside a more familiar, personalized one-on-one interpretation that focuses on finer details—cracks, splats, and cuts within the surface and the self.
There are particular dichotomies established between creation and ending, as well as lightness and heaviness. Imagery of bubbles and puffs of flame shift, stretch, and collide with landscapes of mountains, flying bricks, floral motifs, and leaking wounds. These icons blip, dissolve, float, and fracture, serving as anchors for interpretation.
The paintings exist in a liminal surface space, created using a unique reverse stain technique that places the compositions in states of ambiguity and perceptual tension. Motifs appear as echoes—fading at one end while emerging at another. Layers of paint blend real and virtual worlds in varying proportions, colliding to form pictorial images often understood only through impressions of past spaces hidden behind references to cracks, caves, and windows.
Figures transfixed in a gaze or appearing hypnotized look outward from dissipating cosmic collisions. While larger paintings depict these worlds in full, the smaller works operate on another level, where motifs transform into simplified, configured characters and faces.
Works on paper serve as advanced studies, allowing greater freedom in generating ideas and compositions through watercolor, ink, and resin. This material fluidity aligns closely with the large-scale works. Collage and manipulated digital imagery converge much like visual interference phenomena in augmented reality.
Focused on themes of identity, memory, and loss, Hood explores the broader role of images and contemporary painting through a distinctive approach to abstraction—where personal and social imagery collide in the 21st century.
Chris Hood holds a BFA from Georgia State University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. After working for many years in New York, he relocated his studio permanently to Los Angeles. His solo exhibitions include Praz-Delavallade (Los Angeles), Lyles & King (New York), MIER Gallery (Los Angeles), and Galerie Bernard Ceysson (Paris). Group exhibitions include the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Venus Over Los Angeles, CANADA (New York), Saatchi Gallery (London), and Jack Hanley (New York). His work has been featured in Art in America, Elephant, Mousse, The Art Newspaper, Time Out, and New American Paintings.
Since 1995, Villa Aurora in Los Angeles has offered residency fellowships to writers, filmmakers, visual artists, and composers. Once a year, an American visual artist is invited to Berlin.
