The Light is Leaving Us, 2021
Christopher Orr, born in 1967, Helensburgh, Scotland. He lives and works in London.
His eye has never wavered from his landscapes of dense forests and endless plains.
His intimate canvases oscillate between the real and the disturbingly strange, on the border between the natural and the supernatural, history and folklore, fiction and formalism, science and the imaginary.
Inspired by both 19th-century English painting and old masters such as J.M.W. Turner, Chritopher Orr translates their reveries to the contemporary age. Never entirely visible, already gone or asleep, his figures seem constructed from the same material as the landscape around them. We contemplate them frozen, not knowing where they come from or where they're going.
He has taken part in institutional exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, the Royal Academy in London, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Witte de With in Rotterdam and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Baselland Basel, the 54th Venice Biennale, CAPC Musée d'art contemporain Bordeaux and Kunsthalle Brandts Odense.