WILDFLOWER PLAYHOUSE PRESENTS

Christopher Schuldt:
CHOPPED.

ON VIEW IN THE GALLERY DEC 9 - JAN 3

ARTIST RECEPTION & PERFORMANCE ART SCREENING
Fri, Dec 12, 4-7pm

COLLECTION

Wildflower Playhouse is pleased to present recent work by Christopher Schuldt. Chopped. is a selection of recent abstract paintings. The work is guided by letting forms arise that speak to the artist through his relationship to everyday life. The process of making the paintings relies foremost on intuition. When the intuitive process fails and doubt grows, these forms; objects, visual perspective, language, history - are relied upon to carry the painting forward. Through these paintings, Schuldt attempts to reach a picture that holds potentially contradictory frameworks of understanding the world.

Christopher Schuldt is a painter living and working in Taos, NM. His practice is invested in abstraction as a method of reaching toward latent meaning in forms drawn from his life experiences and the systems of knowledge that structure his understanding of the world. He is an Adjunct instructor at UNM Taos. Christopher earned a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, in Minneapolis MN, in 2019, and an MFA from University of New Mexico in 2024. He was part of the Site Scholar program and exhibited work with the 2023 Site Scholar cohort at SITE Santa Fe. He has also recently shown work at the University of New Mexico Art Museum, John Sommers Gallery, Sanitary Tortilla Factory, and Bingo.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The spiritual is mysterious to me and no less real. I express the condition of life that things are more than they appear to be, resulting in paintings with open and shifting forms, contradictory systems of visual logic, and figure-ground reversal. I value abstraction's ability to operate on many levels simultaneously, gesturing towards form and representation while allowing latent meanings to emerge, grow, and shift with our experience.

My initial relationship to mark and form is intuitive. I play with color, composition, and oppositional mark making. As forms begin to gain clarity I cultivate them in the direction most resonant with their potential emergent qualities. I am excited about contradiction, and the possibility for it to co-exist on the canvas. Design logic that does not quite fit together. Illusionistic space and materiality of surface that disrupts it. Visual perspective and typographic forms. I shift the logic of how I have been regarding the painting, inserting concepts and history. The reach toward contradiction and its resolution is a reach towards a space that holds more than it can, a gesture that reflects the condition of life having an unseen inner dimension.

*By appointment and for events, please contact us to schedule an appointment