RESIDENT ARTIST CHRIS HOOD

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68projects by GALERIEKORNFELD‍

presents in cooperation with Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e.V.‍

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RESIDENT ARTIST CHRIS HOOD   ‍

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68projects and Galerie Kornfeld are pleased to announce Chris Hood as the 2019 Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V. Berlin Fellow and 68projects resident artist.

During his residency Chris Hood will spend several weeks in Berlin working on a new body of work at the studio of 68projects inspired and influenced from his stay in the city. The residency will be followed by a solo exhibition from November 22, 2019 to January 18, 2020. The residency and exhibition aim to introduce the artist to a new public and present his works for the first time in Berlin. The Fellowship aims to foster sustainable cultural exchange with artists from the United States and the Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House alumni.

Chris Hood is an American artist born in Atlanta who currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Chris holds a BFA from Georgia State University and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. After his studies he spent many years working from New York before moving his studio permanently to Los Angeles. Chris Hood's paintings reflect an understanding of abstraction in which personal and social imagery collide in the 21st century. Combining traditional techniques with the languages of digital territories, his work often features images culled from American counterculture, art history, and mass media rendered abstract by translation. The paintings are cast in a liminal surface space with a unique reverse stain technique that rests his compositions in ambiguous and perceptual tension. His multidisciplinary and cross-directional works consist of imagery found through research, note-taking and observation. As the artist states, he collects artefacts of looking, retrieved from sources like the internet, gifs, stickers, vintage patches, and advertisements. These icons blip, dissolve, float, and fracture, serving as pegs for interpretation. Focused on themes of identity, memory and loss, Hood explores within his paintings the wider role of images and contemporary painting.

Chris Hood has had solo exhibitions at 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 (Los Angeles), CANADA (New York), Saatchi Gallery (London), and Jack Hanley (New York) among others. Hood's work has been featured in Art in America, Elephant, Mousse, The Art Newspaper, Time Out, and New American Paintings. We look forward to discovering with you, through our studio visits and coming exhibition, how the visual codes in the city of Berlin will be interpreted, translated, and transmitted through the artist's unique painterly marks and images.

Since 1995, Villa Aurora in Los Angeles offers residency fellowships to writers, filmmakers, visual artists, and composers. Its fellows and the Friends of the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House have made it an important gathering place for people in and outside of Los Angeles for conversations and cultural life. Once a year an American visual artist is invited to Berlin. 68projects and Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e.V. have already a history of collaborations including residencies with artists Sandeep Mukherjee in 2017 and Michael John Kelly in 2018 both followed by exhibitions. 68projects has also hosted three exhibitions as part of the Berlin–L.A. Trilogie which presented the works of artists who lived in either Berlin or Los Angeles for a period of up to three months. Each in its own way, the two cities functioned as sources of inspiration and spaces of concentration, embedded within a forum of intellectual debates and encounters.

Please contact us if you would like to interview the artist or receive further press material and images.