Christopher Pate

Born in St. Louis, Missouri; raised in Boise, Idaho; received BA in Studio Art from Pitzer College, Claremont, California; lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Christopher Pate is obsessed with serious abstract painting.  It is his belief that abstraction can still effectively address the particular nature of our world, even as we are bombarded with a dizzying profusion of disposable media images.  He has taken his own peculiar path, working through the history of modernism, only to arrive at a mode of painting on burlap that embraces the commonly perceived irrelevancy of abstraction, yet resurrects it as something distinctly of this time and place.  The paintings act as crude screens in which the eye is drawn to the center of a meditative, luminous space.  The surfaces come alive as much through subtraction as addition, abrasion battering the rough fabric into submission.  At the end of this rigorous process, the paintings glow with a luster that ranges from the duskily poetic to the candy-colored, suggesting that there is a comic side to every serious endeavor.

Christopher Pate’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions within the US and abroad.  His work as a curator has led to such notable group exhibitions as “Tripindicular” at lemon sky (1999) and the ongoing series of “Rogue Wave” exhibitions at LA Louver in Venice, California.

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