Chris Baker

2004 - 2007 Goldsmiths College

2007 - 2010 Royal Academy Schools

Willfully taking on and using the motifs of paintings history Bakers works negotiate an idiosyncratic idea of painting, where references from high art (from Picasso to Abstraction) are taken, confounded and muddled up. Uniting all the works is a witty opticality and a seemingly effortless play with the unique properties and languages of paintings. In his practice the overload of painting references is not a reductive commentary on the condition of painting. On the contrary, there is a great passion for the art of the past, and an investigation into how artists have always struggled to express themselves and their time through the reoccurring motifs and forms of painting. Bakers paintings are ultimately optimistic, inventive and surprising.

Royal Academy Schools, London, GB, Fine Art,