Sacred and Profane PEZ Painting

Kent Christensen's drawings, prints and oil paintings investigate personal and societal associations with food, place and popular culture. They also embrace the traditions of still life painting, religious iconography and Pop Art. Christensen's images examine and re-contextualize emotional and psychological associations with the power of food imagery in art through the ages. His subjects have been arranged in specific ways that reference modern and classical art. Landscapes and cityscapes call up specific biographical references and add contextual layers of meaning that are at once specific and ambiguous. Personal and spiritual icons are sometimes included or hidden in the pictures, creating totems that evoke a sense of ritual and intimacy. Cultural and social satire also factor largely into his works. Christensen grew up in the orange groves of California, where he acquired a fondness for orange crate labels, popular culture and local fast food. Raised in Mormon culture, with its strict prohibitions against vices such as smoking and drinking, he gained an appreciation for the substitute vice of sugar "” an indulgence so zealous that the artist refers to sugar as 'Mormon Heroin.' His work functions as both celebration and satire of this 'Mormon folly' for sweets. It also operates in the larger context of America's corresponding insatiable appetite for "just about everything; with its greed, materialism, rising obesity levels and contradictory obsessions with fast food, over-indulgence, fitness and body image." Kent Christensen was born in Los Angeles in 1957. He lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah.