Chris Mir show opens Saturday at Windsor Art Center

Windsor Art Center
40 Mechanic St., Windsor, (860) 688-2528
Remembering the Future: The Paintings of Christopher Mir
May 7-June 5, 2010
Opening Reception: Sat., May 8, 5-7 p.m.

Press release

Hamden, Connecticut artist Christopher Mir's paintings will be featured at the Windsor Art Center beginning May 8 and running through June 24. You owe it to yourself to explore this world class artist's work made up of mythical figures, creatures, machines, and fragments of ambiguous forms. There will be an opening reception this Sat., May 8, 5-7 p.m.

Mir's work has been exhibited widely in NYC, and Barcelona, Spain, Berlin, Germany, and in Connecticut at the Matrix Gallery, Wadsworth Atheneum, the Silvermine Gallery in New Canaan and the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield to name just a few, and now you have the chance to see for yourself what all the interest is about.

Alex Philips writing for Metropolitan in Barcelona Spain in June 2009, says about Mir:

With careful brilliance and not a hint of sentimentality, American painter Christopher Mir ... cuts through the tripe of media sensationalism and scaremongering, and the incongruous advertising campaigns that share their pages or websites. ....Mir, whose background is in anthropology, creates imaginary but logical scenes, juxtaposing cheesy publicity style shots of figures alone, or in family groups, placing them in desolate, environmentally-ravaged landscapes, or in mystical imaginary ones, with the sinister intrigue of a Grimm Brothers' fairy story.

His figures, supremely well painted, appear like something between a tourist campaign and Dorothea Lange's photographs of poor American families during the Depression. They are isolated yet accepting, aware of what's going on around them, yet passive.

Christopher Mir has a unique painting style. He combines images from found photographs into works that nod in the direction of collage and straddle the line between the tradition of American landscape painting and surrealism. Mir collects photographs from magazines, books on national parks, calendars and the Internet and uses them as a starting point for his compositions. He then layers his canvas with these images. This creates work that seems familiar at first glance but upon further study takes on a disjointed, dreamlike quality.

The Board of Directors of the Windsor Art Center would like to thank the following individuals and businesses for their gracious support of this exhibition and for helping to make it all possible.

• Alice and Dan Ferraina for their generous contribution to help underwrite the cost of mounting this exhibition.

• The George and Grace long Foundation for its support of the programming taking place during the exhibition.

• Malcolm and Virginia Nicholls for loaning work from their private collection and for all of their help in mounting the exhibition.

• International Transfer Service (ITS) for providing door to door transport of some of the work in the exhibition.