Christopher Winter

The artist Christopher Winter's watercolors and paintings are often concerned with the elusive conditions and boundaries that surround the notion of innocence. Inspired by how idealized representations of German and British childhoods counter contemporary experience, Winter depicts young adolescents whose pure-as-snow appearances conflict with their decidedly adult, and sometimes violent or morbid, actions. In his series Songs of Innocence I and II (where children are dressed in traditional Bavarian costume) or Janet and John (where the characters are drawn from 1940s British children's books) boys and girls contemplate their own existence, expose themselves to one another, become sacrifices, and partake in gender role reversals—to name just a few scenarios. His frequent intermixture of nature and cityscape furthers the contrast of tradition and modernity, and poses the question of what is authentic, pure experience.

The artist's work has been exhibited at such institutions as the Städtisches Museum, the Wilhelm-Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen, and the Reiss Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim.