Martin Museum | Exhibition Opening Day: Paradise Tossed

Get a glimpse of the fantastic world of Christian Rieben in his solo exhibition at the Martin Museum of Art. His work explores the contradictions inherent in representing three-dimensional imagery on a two-dimensional surface. 

“I will often start a painting either through a pour or through working reductively (or sometimes a combination of the two), and I do this to avoid making trite, clichéd imagery. It's so easy to just rehash the same old images that people have been looking at forever, and the problem is when that happens, people stop looking because they think they already know what these things look like. So, I really try to avoid clichés and doing a pour and working reductively without a plan relinquishes some of that conscious control that leads to stale predictability.” - Christian Rieben

The conflation of the pre-Modern idea of the painting as a window into another world with the Modern idea of the painting as an object and a record of its own construction yields imaginative, tension-filled imagery. This art-historical content lies alongside Rieben’s diaristic narrative, in which metaphorical characters stand in for the artist himself in the emotional travails of his life.

• Free and open to the public.
• Please check our hours before visiting!
• Learn more about our exhibitions here.
• Learn more about Christian Rieben here.