08/15/2024
Meet Kris Knight!
👨🎨
Kris Knight is a Canadian painter whose work revolves around representation, queerness and
intimacy. He is interested in the portrayal of diverse modes of masculinity, creating work that
celebrates tenderness, vulnerability and ambiguity.
Knight’s romantic figurative paintings and portraits are simultaneously intimate and remote,
heavy and light, dense and playful; presenting emotional worlds: portals of the artist’s past and
present, retreating from the muchness of the world as much as they reflect it. The reflexivity of
his narratives is rooted in personal memory but also depict life in the present, imbuing
contemporary subject matter with historical art references and colour palettes. His pastel and
tonal oil paintings conjure a series of shifting moods, themes and experiences that are
connected by a wide range of positions regarding the private and public self. Working from personal images often collaged with found imagery and historical references, Knight’s paintings present a quiet, elegant world dominated by sensitivity and subtle melancholy
Kris Knight (b. 1980, Canada) is a Toronto based artist who received his Associate degree from
the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCADU) in 2003. His work has been exhibited
internationally in numerous group and solo exhibitions including most recently “Superhost” at Spinello Projects, Miami, (2024) “Auscultate” at Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal (2020), “A
Little Time Out” at Galerie Alain Gutharc, Paris (2019). Recent Group exhibitions include “My
Velvet Shadow” at CLAMP, New York (2023), “Come Out & Play” at Beers London, London
(2022), “Male” at Galerie Thomas Fuchs, Stuttgart (2019) and “Drawings” at Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto (2019).
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Artist portrait, 📷: Jaclyn Locke
Kris Knight, Malus Branch, 2024. Oil on prepared paper, 16 x 12 in.
Kris Knight, Malus Blossom, 2024. Oil on prepared paper, 16 x 12 in.
