Chris Finley
Instagram: the_crooked_yolk
Bio: "Chris Finley, 1971, Carmel, California Lives and works in Petaluma, California. Finley's work has been included in national and international Museum exhibitions including, 01.01.01: Art in Technological Times, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Game Show, MASS MOCA, North Adams, MA; 2002 Orange County Museum of Art Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Twisted. Urban and Visionary Landscapes in Contemporary Painting, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Just Past: The Contemporary in MOCA's Permanent Collection, 1975-1996, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Defining The Nineties, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, and the Orange County Museum. Finley’s exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Frieze, Teme Celeste, Art Issues, Forbes, Art and Auction, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. His work is included in the book “Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting”, by Bob Nikas. PHAIDON publishing. He received a Pollock/ Krasner Foundation Grant in 2010 and was awarded a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation in 2003. He received the SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999. He is a Professor of Art at San Francisco State University. "
Statement: My pencil drawings are balanced between beauty and horror. Each one functions like a salad of mixed parts, some known and some unknowable: reptile, mammal, insect, and the fades and mullets of male fashion models. Each part is painstakingly rendered, integrated mark by mark into one creature. While these drawings have all the literal pieces of figuration, they are more deeply rooted in abstraction and surrealism, allowing the viewer to bring their own visceral reactions to the finished drawing.
