Christian Rieben | Paradise Tossed

Exhibition Dates: June 9th through November 7th, 2026

Christian Rieben’s work uses the landscape as a vehicle for storytelling, illustrating and embodying a fantastical world that is a bit Lewis Carroll and a bit Carl Jung. The characters and narratives of this world are a combination of contemporary, political and social discourses, and a mirror for personal situations; intermixing, and planted in a moment of subversive, existential awareness. All in the family, the characters in Rieben’s work navigate to an atavistic world that is dark, chaotic, comic, and joyful; a dreamscape of lush imagery and macabre humor.

“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