| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Christian Eckart is a modern iconographer who fuses Renaissance religious art methods and materials with contemporary industrial products. His lectures have taken him across North America and Europe, and his articles and essays have taken his ideas around the world.
The Calgary-born Eckart studied sculpture at the Alberta College of Art + Design until 1984, and he then earned his M.F.A. in painting at Hunter College at the City University of New York (1986). After receiving dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship (1994), Eckart lived and worked in Berlin (1986) before splitting his time between Brooklyn and Amsterdam (1998 – 2002), and finally settling in Houston.
Eckart says that his experience growing up near the foothills around Calgary “overwhelmed and engrossed [him] by the seemingly infinite scale of the sky and land [which] informed an existential sensibility [that became] a major factor” in his work. His career has explored what he calls the “economies of paradigmatic abstraction in the 20th century” through creating contemporary icons in the tradition of artists such as Malevich, Reinhardt, and Ryman, and Nouveau Realistes such as Fontana, Klein, and Manzoni.
Of all his work, Eckart’s best known is his Andachtsbild, Eidolon, White Painting and Icon-Type series. These paintings use materials, techniques, and forms native to European religious artworks since the Renaissance, and juxtapose them with industrial paints and solids such as Formica® and Plexiglas®. Other works, including his hyper-realized Curved Monochrome, Sacra Conversazione, and Zootrope paintings, are made from aluminum and hand-polished automobile lacquer based on Rolls Royce-modified Chinese lacquer techniques.
Eckart’s more than 60 solo exhibitions have travelled across Canada, the U.S., and Europe. Numerous private and permanent public collections embrace his work, including those of the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, and the Australian National Gallery. |