Chris Ritson - Featured Artist

Chris Ritson - Decadent

Chris Ritson is a multi-media artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work presents an array of concerns that include the body, morphology and culture, in an entrancing and grotesque kaleidoscope. Ritson’s work reminds that underlying and supporting any cultural endeavor and achievement are mysterious organic processes, continual mutation, putrefaction and rebirth.



Images of the kind of bodies found in tabloids, fitness magazines, and pornography are clipped and reassembled by Ritson into new animals and abstract forms. Ritson employs intricate sculptural and collage techniques to create works that transform the utterly banal into complex forms that elude definition.



Ritson’s approach to dealing with the body is somewhat similar to that of Tim Hawkinson, though Ritson’s work is infused with more wonder, and more affinity for the mysterious and unnamable, as opposed to Hawkinson’s clever puns and ironies.



“I am nature,” Jackson Pollock famously proclaimed. Chris Ritson’s work approaches nature and humanity in a way that shifts the focus of Pollock’s quotation from the personal to the universal. Everything is nature.




Chris Ritson currently has a solo exhibition on view at the Basement Gallery in Oakland, California.


See more of Chris Ritson’s work at his website:
http://www.chrisritson.com/