Christopher Culver: House on Canal

For his first exhibition in Japan, Christopher Culver presents seven new works on paper in House on Canal. The drawings on the ground floor of the gallery depict small fragments of a long canal at midday. A discarded bottle, a preening duck turned inwards, and a shoal of fish are all suspended in the artificial waterway’s acrid, warm green haze. On a concrete ledge, blue-patterned paper Dixie bowls hold kibble for free-roaming cats. 

On the upper floor of the gallery, three drawings depict a single figure indoors. A man lies still with his head on a towel. Behind him, the blades of two box fans have stopped. The three works depict the artist’s boyfriend, a filmmaker.

Culver’s process starts with his own photographs, with which he aims to document an environment where duration pours over still objects. He works on a vertical plane with wall-mounted paper. Pigment is dragged onto the picture-plane from the sides with sponges, blending stumps and brushes. Layers of charcoal and pastel leave the paper with a saturated, ashy finish redolent of film grain. He builds and erases the drawings over and over again: repetitions of accumulation and subtraction.

Christopher Culver was born in Miami in 1985 and lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008 and his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. Selected solo exhibitions include Modern Art, London (2025); American Art Catalogues, New York (2025); Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (2024); Chapter NY, New York (2023); The Meeting, New York, and A.D., New York (both 2021); and Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles (2017).