October 16 - November 13

(Back Gallery Space)

GHC is pleased to present new works by internationally acclaimed artist Christian Eckart.

Eckart’s recent works reflect upon our climate crisis and involve photographs of pristine natural locations and phenomena, seemingly untouched by civilization, such as woodlands and cloudscapes. These large-scale works are a way for the artist to think visually about new ways of picture-making in the post-internet era. They reference 19th and 20th century painting in the tradition of the Northern Romantic Sublime of works such as Casper David Friedrich's lone figures, J.M.W. Turner's turbulent seascapes, Frederic Church's breathtaking landscapes and J.A.M. Whistler's nocturnes. These artists apprehended, translated and distilled the grandeur of nature.

Forest 1, 2021, a stunning work, is a re-presentation of a seemingly limitless forest scene, is inspired by, amongst other historical works, Gustav Klimt’s paintings of birch forests and the majesty of nature itself. The forest image is manipulated, fractured and obscured within thin translucent veils of jewel-toned geometric fields, integrating and scrambling discernible layers and spaces of image and abstraction. 

Utilizing image processing and glitching software has resulted in a manner of working that allows the artist to examine the viability of new technologies, hardware and software for image making. The works are meant to outline concerns about how the spaces of the natural, the cultural and the digital/virtual, impact and inform one another as a result of their interaction, juxtaposition and collision. They're also motivated by a desire to articulate and deploy a type of hybrid art-form that indexes various tropes of 20th century abstraction (Rothko, Newman, Reinhardt, Judd and Serra) resulting in a form that is neither painting, drawing, photography or sculpture but something that operates in the interstitial space between and around those forms.

As always Eckart is motivated by a need to propose aspects and elements of what he refers to in the past as a meta-sublime. This generally means creating works that interrogate their own utility, construction and the questions surrounding what one might refer to as the sacred space of painting. 

Canadian born (Calgary, Alberta, 1959, American citizenship since 1995) international artist Christian Eckart, formerly based in New York (1984-2003), settled in Houston, Texas at the beginning of 2003. During the 20 years he lived in NYC and up to the present Eckart’s work has been the subject of over 60 solo exhibitions, including many museum surveys, and has been included in over 150 group exhibitions. His work is represented in many important private and public permanent collections including those of The Guggenheim Museum, N.Y., The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, The Chicago Art Institute, The Detroit Institute of Art, the Broad Art Foundation and The Art Gallery of Ontario as well as many others throughout North America, Europe and Asia. He split his time between New York and Berlin, 1996-1997, and then between New York and Amsterdam, 1997-2000. Christian Eckart was an instructor at The School of Visual Art, New York from 1994 through 2002, the Glassell School of Art, New York of The Museum of Fine Art Houston from 2003 through 2005, and he held visiting professorships at both the University of Houston and Rice University. In 2009 he received the distinguished honour of being inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts. He has lectured extensively throughout North America and Europe, realized many public and private commissions, organized group exhibitions and published a number of essays and articles.

GROUP EXHIBITION
(Front Gallery Space)
OCTOBER 16 - NOVEMBER 7

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