Chris Watts is an abstract painter and mixed-media artist whose work seeks to revise, interrogate, and re-examine social and personal narratives through the transfiguration of painting, drawing, video, and installations. This re-examination also seeks to create a project of disruption. Currently, these projects exist as representations of windows as switches into another, layered, assemblage of spaces where the distinction between what is real and what is represented is thoroughly confused.
Watts (b. 1984, High Point, NC) shares his time between New York and North Carolina. He attended the MFA program at Yale School of Art after graduating from the College of Arts and Architecture, University of North Carolina in 2009, and the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Wroclaw, Poland, in 2006. Watts has held various artist residencies including the Marek Maria Pienkowski Foundation, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, the Art & Law Fellowship Program at Cornell University Art Architecture Planning, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, and the 2022-2023 Soros Justice Fellowship Program.
His work has been exhibited at Welancora Gallery, Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York, NY; Bode Projects in Berlin, DE; Monica King Contemporary in New York, NY; Artspace Visual Art Center in Raleigh, NC; Galleria Pienkow in Lipinki, Poland; Knockdown Center in New York, NY; and McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, NC, among others.
His work is in the collection of the Mint Museum, Davidson College, and the Jimenez-Colon Collection. Watts' work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, ARTNews, and Brooklyn Magazine. He is a featured artist in the documentary film The Art of Making It, directed by Kelcey Edwards and produced by Emmy-nominated producer Debi Wisch (The Price of Everything).
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