Artist : Chris Anthem
Title : The Telling of Adji Sarr
Medium : charcoal and chalk on paper
Dimensions : 160 x 120 cm


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Chris Anthem is a British artist. He has strong links to Lebanon and East Africa, living and painting in Sudan for the past 4 years, and more recently in Mauritania and Senegal. Anthem studied fine art in Liverpool and then the Slade School of Fine Art London. Projects have included painting dresses for Basil Soda Haute Couture and The Budapest Art Factory Residency. He is presently researching a new body of work in Dakar, Senegal.

“The mark has an ambiguous nature; on the one hand pertaining to be other than its material actuality, whilst it still offers the possibility of being congruent with an honesty of spirit. I recognise that honesty in artworks when I’ve managed to keep its energy there. In some works that honesty dies, it gets lost in its own rhetoric and the energy dies, or rather the works commit their own clichéd suicide, stillborn in the cowl glister of varnish. It still surprises me that honesty and mortality are still so co-dependent and that short-cuts of effect kill paintings. Every successful artwork that I’ve done has had at its core a tangible event, something unresolved and nagging to get itched. That before the idea, the internal image, before the composition and the stitching of sources and technique there is the event. In the painting, in spite of its seductive surfaces and its neurotic baroque, there lies some tender actuality that only a pencil, or brush and oil would soothe, and only a humility of mark can address. The materials  are the salve that cures the surface – balm of a meglip scab. And I guess it’s that rupture, that intrusion on the surface tension on the canvas; or paper, or mind, or body, that the rest of the painting dresses – like you would, whether functionally or theatrically, a wound.”