This monograph on Christopher Orr is a survey of the Scottish painter's most recent body of work. The book is introduced by a foreword by Patricia Fisher, Edinburgh's Talbot Rice Gallery curator, and contains two essays—by Max Hollein, Director of Schirn Kunsthalle, Städel Museum and Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt, and The Lonely Piper.
Born in Helensburgh (Scotland) in 1967, Christopher Orr studied at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee (Scotland), and at the Royal College of Art, London. Active since the beginning of the 2000s, he currently lives and works in London. His intimately scaled canvases oscillate between reality and the uncanny, exploring the realms of the natural and supernatural, folklore and history, fiction and formalism, science and the sublime. His imagery is drawn from an extensive archive comprising vintage magazines, science textbooks, 16mm and Super 8 film stills, allowing him to produce extraordinary juxtapositions from everyday source materials. Remote figures, incongruous objects, and phantasmagoric landscapes mined from these multiple sources coalesce, as Christopher Orr assembles different epochs and narratives into surreal collages. His painting echoes different generations of Old and Modern Masters—for example J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich—and proves his ability to give birth to solid compositions through layers of translucent pigments and varying approaches to representation.
