Chris Newman is a multi-talented artist, a border crosser who experiments between the fields of music, painting, drawing, video, sculpture and literature. born in London in 1958, he graduated from King's College London in 1979 with a Bachelor of Music. from 1980 to 1983, Newman studied with Mauricio Kagel at the Cologne University of Music. He translated Russian poetry into English and wrote poetry himself. He is co-founder of a rock band and composer of songs, choral works, sonatas, piano pieces and piano concertos. chris Newman began painting in 1989, and since 1994 he has been creating installations that combine two different media (installed concerts / live installations); more recently he has been presenting his paintings in an increasingly sculptural and installative manner. from 2001 to 2002, Newman taught sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. The artist lives and works in Berlin.
"Chris Newman kept his eyes closed while he painted the pictures that are now being exhibited in Dresden: The fading out of the visual world allows entry into a different world of perception, which lives from deeply feeling, vulnerable senses and is able to produce an untouchable artistic logic of its own in these states of the soul. (...) Newman has found a form of painting that seems only possible for a musician or a contemplatively absorbed person. Perhaps it gives him an inkling of the aesthetic unity that has been lost."
- MARIETTA FRANKE -
On the artistic work of Chris Newman, 2008
Catalogue
A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition.