Artist : Chris Anthem
Title : The Madonna of Fatmagul
Medium : mixed media on cow hide
Dimensions : 160 x 160 cm


ENQUIRE ABOUT THIS WORK

Chris Anthem is a British artist who has for many years lived and worked between Lebanon, East and West Africa. Anthem studied fine art in Liverpool and then the Slade School of Fine Art London. Recent 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.

“Paint 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 paintings when I’ve managed to keep its energy there. In some paintings that honesty dies, it gets lost in its own rhetoric and the painting’s energy dies, or rather the paintings 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 painting 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 brush and oil would soothe, and only a humility of mark can address. Paint and oil 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.”