Artist: Christopher Schade

The Painting Center presents Strange Land, a solo exhibition by Christopher Schade in the Main Gallery. For his second solo exhibition, Christopher Schade is exhibiting works from two interrelated series: Perceived Landscapes and Envisaged Landscapes. The exhibition includes 49 oil paintings, graphite drawings, and scratchboard pieces made over the course of 18 years (2007-2025).

Grounded in observation, Schade’s Perceived Landscapes are mundane, ambiguous, and from a shareable reality. Using these paintings as a source, he then makes his Envisaged Landscapes, which become sensory paradoxes where the known is subverted into the unknown. For the past twenty years, Schade has been exploring phenomenology, psychology, and perception. The central questions being: what assumptions do we make about reality, and how accurate are these? How do we understand or misunderstand things, situations, and other people, and what can we agree on as a consensus reality? These questions raise issues surrounding translation and language of communication, including pictorial conventions, culturally specific conceptual differences, the instability and invention of memory, and the currently fluid nature of agreed-upon truth in technology and politics. As Anna Ehrsam writes in her essay for the accompanying catalog, “These are not imagined landscapes, they are observations shifted out of alignment, closer to psychological truth than visual fact.”

Christopher Schade was born in Austin, Texas, and was raised in Austin and in Quirihue, Chile. Schade received his Bachelor of Arts in Art from the University of Texas at Austin in Plan II Honors Humanities and Studio Art in Painting and received his Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Upon graduation, he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

He has had solo and two-person exhibitions at The Painting Center and Kai Matsumiya Gallery in New York City, Gallery VERY and the Boston Design Center in Boston, dberman gallery in Austin, and Conduit Gallery in Dallas. Group exhibitions in New York City include shows at The Painting Center, Park Place Gallery, Blackburn 20/20, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brian Morris Gallery, and GRG gallery, in Massachusetts at Gallery VERY, Drive-By Projects, Geoffrey Young Gallery, and Sampson Projects Gallery, and in Texas at The Contemporary Austin Jones Center, dberman Gallery, and Conduit Gallery. He has received the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, Blanche E. Colman Award from BNY Mellon, and the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Grant from The Dallas Museum of Art. His work has been written about in Battery Journal, Boston Art Review, Interview Magazine, The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Dallas Art Revue, Austin American-Statesman, and The Austin Chronicle.

He was a founder of the Artist Lecture Series in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and he has curated numerous group exhibitions, including “Prime Matter” at the Teckningsmuseet (Museum of Drawings) in Laholm, Sweden. He teaches painting and drawing as an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Boston Art and Art History Department. He lives and works in Watertown, Massachusetts.