Christian Rieben | UPWARD gallery - Discover the world of modern artists and show your creative

Blue Moon

Oil on canvas

42x31"

$2600

Indifferent Strokes

Oil on canvas

48x48"

$2800

Star-studded Event

Oil on canvas

48x48"

$3000

Reapers, Creepers

Oil on canvas

38x32"

$2600

Twittering Machine 2.0

Oil on canvas

38x33"

$2400

Pack Lunch

Oil on canvas

48x48"

$2800

A Dog's Tale

Oil on canvas

48x48"

$3500

Oedipussy

Oil on canvas

48x48"

$3000

Leggacy

Oil on canvas

44x44"

$2800

The Origin of Species

Oil on canvas

48x48"

$3200

Checking Out Holes

Oil on canvas

90x72"

$6500

Great Again!

Oil on canvas

90x72"

$6500

Biography:

Christian Rieben's paintings address issues in contemporary cultural and political discourse through hybridized motifs of landscape, figuration, portraiture, and abstraction. A nomadic upbringing has manifested into the comfortable movement between discordant and harmonious themes, textures, and spaces within his work.
Rieben's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at The Reece Museum in Johnson City, Tennessee, The Bike Room, Chicago, Illinois, and Gallery 73, Belgrade, Serbia. Selected group exhibitions include shows at Tyger Tyger Gallery, Asheville, North Carolina, National Veterans Art Museum, Chicago, Illinois, and Cumberland Haus, Berlin, Germany. Rieben received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently living in a fishing village on the shores of Lake Michigan with his bloodhound, Bingo.

Education:

MFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois BA University of California, Santa Cruz, California

Statement:

I am a painter. There are multiple threads that weave through my work, but they all start from a constructed fantastical world that I use as a venue for storytelling. Characters, places, and narratives are cousins of those that we encounter in our world, but they lie outside the parameters and fall between the categories that contain us.
I start with a landscape, through which I introduce portraiture, figurative painting, abstraction, or a combination of these motifs; the subject itself can often flit in the spaces between ideas: there might be work that is about personal loss, but at the same time it is about ambition or contemporary politics. This inbetweenness is indicative of the way we actually process our time in the world; we are influenced by myriad sources, all of them potentially powerful, and this includes sources from diverse visual languages – whether that is conventional realism, pop culture stylization, or something else entirely. One thing I want viewers to get when looking at my work is that I'm trying to visually (and conceptually) synthesize things that aren’t necessarily analogous, but do end up coexisting in a diverse world. I don't always know what that looks like when I start, but the search for a natural-seeming synthesis is an integral component of the image’s construction. We are complex and subtle creatures with various experiences, thoughts, and feelings. These myriad phenomena are sometimes contradictory, but they are essential to our sense of self.

Website:

www.christianrieben.com

Contact:

christian@christianrieben.com