Lecture: Tuesday, March 7, 2017 7:00 – 8:30pm
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA
Chris Finley’s idiosyncratic sculptures often solicit viewers to perform prescriptive rituals that unearth hidden layers of narrative content within stacks and groupings of everyday objects.
His disfigured and distorted paintings of world record holders, politicians, and celebrity entrepreneurs paradoxically recall the Futurists’ glorification of speed and technology while ultimately critiquing our current mediated experience.
Finley’s exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Frieze, Teme Celeste, Art Issues, Forbes, Art and Auction, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times.
His work is included in the book “Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting”, by Bob Nikas. PHAIDON publishing.
His work has been included in national and international Museum exhibitions including, 01.01.01: Art in Technological Times, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Game Show, MASS MOCA, North Adams, MA; 2002 Orange County Museum of Art Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Twisted. Urban and Visionary Landscapes in Contemporary Painting, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Just Past: The Contemporary in MOCAʼs Permanent Collection, 1975-1996, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Defining The Nineties, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus Ohio, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison Wisconsin.
He received a Pollock/ Krasner Foundation Grant in 2010 and was awarded a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation in 2003. He received the SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999.
Chris Finley was born in 1971, in Carmel, California
He lives and works in Petaluma, California.
He is a Professor of Art at San Francisco State University.
