Christopher Orr Scottish, b. 1967

Christopher Orr was born in Helensburgh, a historically significant seaside town on the Argyll and Bute coastline of western Scotland and then brought up further up river in Clydebank, an industrial ship building town. The social location of these two points of biography inform his work. Orr has an implicit understanding of the innate contradictions and tensions running between the 19th and 20th century cultural realms, which serve as influences on his painting to date. As a prosperous location to a wealthy class that could escape the increasing discomforts of industrialisation in nearby Glasgow, Helenburgh’s rich history of 19th century painting and architecture includes Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House and the portrait of ‘Lady Helen of Luss’, the eponymous ‘Helen’ after which the town in which he was born is named.

Renowned for his sensuously dark diminutive oil paintings that often employ an earthy palette of browns, reds and ochres, his work appears to capture a lost world, perhaps made from but not located in a discernible past. Orr’s great gift and practice is in the handling of time–through image, sign, and figure–in paint that speaks to our cultural present through redeeming fragments and figures from an analogue past.

Christopher Orr was born in Helensburgh, Scotland in 1967. He studied Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee (2000) and received an MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2003. He now lives and works in London. His work came to the wide attention of international curators with exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth in Zürich and the Third Tate Triennial London. He took part in institutional exhibitions at The Royal Scottish Academy Edinburgh, the Royal Academy London, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Witte de With Rotterdam and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Recent solo institutional shows were held at Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, the 54th Venice Biennale, CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain Bordeaux and Kunsthalle Brandts in Odense.