Christopher Stout “Standing on the Shoulders of Queer Martyrs and Saints”
Lichtundfire
This event has ended.
Lichtundfire presents “Standing on the Shoulders of Queer Martyrs and Saints,” an exhibition of mixed media paintings by New York based artist Christopher Stout concerning Queer abstraction, and his third solo show at the gallery.
Best known for his abstract minimalism, Stout’s fascination and research into the artists making Queer work in New York during the late 1970’s germinates a new series of paintings that contain an additional dimension of self-actualization.
In the artist’s own words…
“Since the outset of my discovery as an artist, I’ve always felt a fundamentally queer component within my work. At core, it would be impossible to bring the best of my intellect and creativity into my painting without my queerness being also present. They are inextricably linked.
A seeming contradiction to the above sentiment is that my work isn’t experienced as what we’ve come to understand in the art world as ‘Queer’, and I suppose I’ve always felt a sense of dissonance between the creation process that recurs in my studio, and how my work resonates within the structure of Contemporary art.
In recent years, I’ve become familiar with Queer abstraction, a largely under-represented genre of LGBT art that formed in the 1960’s. More specifically, I’ve discovered a sense of wonderment about the Queer abstraction being made in New York City during the late 1970’s; that brief, albeit utopian era existing both 10 years post-Stonewall and prior to the blight of the AIDS plague.
Much of the work (both visual and performance) during this timeframe imbues the Queer Renaissance energies of hope and liberation, as well as the splendor found in otherness. Through research, I’ve also been reminded that during this time, all genres of artistic expression served as a creative vocabulary for Queer people, by reason that art was an inherent part of Queer culture.
With these ideas in mind, I set about to imagine a group of Queer-labeled paintings that underscore and embody these values. In many ways, I experience these paintings as self-portraits, and I share them with you with the intention that they will expand the understanding of the inherent possibilities within Queer art, and also provide my Queer artist peers with a broadened understanding of what it could mean for their work to be defined as Queer.”
Christopher Stout was born and raised in Maryland, and is a New York City-based abstract reductive artist who addresses and places his work between the questions of, “what is the construct of painting?” and “what is the construct of sculpture?” He is namely concerned with the additive outcome in merging the vocabularies of both disciplines. Stout has shown extensively with Lichtundfire, including multiple group exhibition projects and the solo exhibitions “COME OUT 2 SHOW THEM” in April 2017 and “SONIC OPERA” in May of 2018.
Media
Schedule
from October 02, 2019 to November 03, 2019
Opening Reception on 2019-10-02 from 18:00 to 20:00