Christopher Culver’s works on paper render scenes that are sourced from his own photographs, often unpopulated though marked with traces of life and the absence of a recent presence. Unmade beds, syringes and smoke plumes point to inhabitants, creating indexical portraits of them through their departure. In darkened interiors, windows become thresholds that interface with the outside world, weaving together a drifting narrative that retains an ambient tenderness. Pressing and rubbing pigment onto paper with sponges and brushes, each drawing emerges via a process of accumulation and subtraction, where built up layers of charcoal and pastel leave the paper with an ashy finish redolent of film grain.

Combining a filmic sensibility with photographic techniques, his scenes are often nocturnal, set in blackened movie theatres and shrouded tenements. Throughout his images, turtles swim, pigeons rest, while dogs and cats are abandoned or confined behind bars. Recent work has captured a quotidian existence rooted in the deindustrialisation of US cities, capturing the long downturn’s structure of feeling, life patterned by dislocation as deindustrialization continues and productivity slows. Culver's process excavates beauty from these waning environments, maintaining the possibility of empathy. His drawings also document the diverse range of lived possibility, between intensity and repose. Men connect through joining techniques in anonymised close-ups. In some works, bodies are rendered so faintly that they emit a spectral presence, fading like memories of the encounters themselves. While Culver’s work does not offer any promises, the appearance of angels throughout his drawings suggests that all is not forsaken.

Christopher Culver was born in Miami in 1985 and lives and works in New York. Culver received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008, and his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. Selected solo exhibitions include: Modern Art, London (2025); American Art Catalogues, New York (2025); Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (2024); Chapter NY, New York (2023); The Meeting, New York; A.D., New York (both 2021); Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles (2017).