Chris Flodberg

Chris Flodberg has been working steadily in Calgary as an artist since the mid 90’s.  After completing his BFA at the former Alberta College of Art and Design, he moved to Edmonton in pursuit of his MFA, which he received in 2000.

After a few years of teaching at ACAD, Flodberg turned his attention to painting full-time.  Known for his prolific and ever-evolving artistic output; Flodberg has exhibited in numerous shows, both in private and public galleries and institutions.  Important shows include a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Calgary, a solo retrospective at the Whyte Museum of the Rockies, inclusion in the Made in Calgary survey at the Glenbow Museum, selection for the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, and representation in the permanent collections of the Glenbow Museum and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Flodberg has been featured in several Glenbow surveys of regional and Canadian art. Flodberg’s art is also featured in the hard-cover publication Chris Flodberg, Paintings,  the forthcoming textbook  Western Voices in Canadian Art, and the book Made in Calgary, an Exploration of Art From the 1960’s to the 2000s. 

Flodberg continues to paint full-time in Calgary and is becoming know for his large, abstract paintings that feature ambiguous, dreamlike spaces populated by mysterious, geometric interventions.

Flodberg’s most recent body of work has moved towards abstraction, creating large paintings that feature ambiguous and dreamlike spaces. Populated by mysterious, geometric interventions and achieved through processes such as masking, filling, sanding, and traditional canvas preparation, Flodberg creates immaculately airbrushed, hard-edged shapes within expressive, painterly colour fields. The juxtaposition of these precise forms against textured, organic grounds creates a strange and compelling tension. The shapes, sometimes reading as apertures, other times as luminous objects activate the surface, shifting it between quasi-landscape and pure abstraction. Like watching clouds, Flodberg wants the viewers to relax into this reality, allowing conceptual thought to give way to intuition, presence, and reflection.

Abstracts

Three years ago, I began experimenting with a process of masking, filling, sanding, and traditional canvas preparation to create immaculately airbrushed, hard-edged shapes within expressive, painterly colour fields. The juxtaposition of these precise forms against textured, organic grounds creates a strange and compelling tension. The shapes, sometimes reading as apertures, other times as luminous objects activate the surface, shifting it between quasi-landscape and pure abstraction. This interplay invites the imagination into a liminal space, neither fully representational nor fully abstract, and produces a contemplative, even disorienting experience that I hope points to the sublime. Each painting becomes a glimpse into a mysterious, contiguous worlds; snapshots of events quietly unfolding. Like watching clouds, I hope viewers can relax into this reality, allowing conceptual thought to give way to intuition, presence, and reflection.

Recently, my palette has grown darker and richer. Airbrushed onto vibrant white grounds, colours emerge with astonishing intensity and luminosity. Set within these deeper fields, the orbs and forms seem to glow from within, radiating an uncanny energy. This dynamic of light and darkness, of clarity and ambiguity, has infused the work with a new vitality and sense of mystery. Because my process is highly improvisational, each painting feels like a further descent into an ever-expanding terrain, full of unknown regions to explore.

My Neighbour’s Bones

The banks of the Bow River are a cemetery of  the bones of dead trees.  The river washes-up sticks that are nearly white, stripped of their bark.  It leaves sticks that have been burned, gnawed by beavers, hacked by tools, and chased by dogs.  Water-logged branches from Columnar Aspen,  Crabapple, Birch,  Green Ash, Caragana, and many more.

Just over the flood berm, the neighbourhood where I live discards its own bones.  Fluorescent-tipped survey sticks that no longer mark a construction site, broken boards from a century-old fence that surrounds a pit where a house used to stand, bamboo gardening sticks from Asia, discarded building materials from a new condo construction, and the broken shaft of a broom; the paint peeling and faded. These are the  bones of my world.

Taken individually, these objects are divorced from context.  Their purpose is exhausted and their destination is the soil or the dump.  But like a Fasces, the ancient symbol of bundled sticks, they gain symbolic and aesthetic power through their juxtaposition in art. They are an ossuary of this moment in time.  Like the tomb of a saint or a pharaoh, the remains of my neighbours have been placed carefully and eternally in the illusion of painting.

Mountains

Flodberg’s mountain series depicts particular peaks between Canmore and Jasper. Treating the paintings as portraits, each mountain forms a component of a set of similarly presented images. Flodberg’s goal was to get away from the typical depiction of mountains, where they are painted as if seen from a distance or in a photograph. Flodberg states, “I came to think of these paintings as being about the air and light that sits between the viewer as well as the mountain itself. I never though of these paintings as ‘pretty’. I wanted to imbue them with a subtle, ominous quality. These places are huge and overwhelming; sublime and perhaps even deadly.”