Artist: Kent Christensen
Title: Pink Doughnut
Medium: Oil on Panel
Price: $1,500
Dimensions: 11.5 x 11.5" unframed, 17 x 17 framed
Artist Statement: The range of human obsession is endless and inexhaustible, and the objects of our individual obsessions define our individual identities. These obsessions operate in the larger context of America’s moral misalignments: its greed, its materialism, its rising obesity levels, which sharply contradict its equally powerful obsessions with pious religion, fitness, and body image. I have built a career as both an illustrator and a painter exploring the cultural and social spaces surrounding, and the contradictions of, the objects of human obsession.
Artist Bio: Kent Christensen’s drawings, prints and oil paintings investigate cultural and personal associations with food, place, art history, religion, and popular culture. They also embrace the traditions of still life painting, religious iconography, surrealism, and pop art. Christensen’s images examine and re-contextualize personal, emotional, and psychological associations with the power of food imagery in art through the ages. His subjects have been arranged in specific ways that reference modern and classical art. Landscapes and cityscapes call up specific biographical references and add contextual layers of meaning that are at once specific and ambiguous. Personal and spiritual icons are sometimes included or hidden in the pictures, creating totems that evoke a sense of ritual and intimacy. Cultural and social satire also factor largely into his works. Christensen grew up in the orange groves of California, where he acquired a fondness for orange crate labels, popular culture, and local fast food. Raised in Latter-day Saint (Mormon) culture, with its strict prohibitions against vices such as smoking and drinking, he gained an appreciation for the substitute vice of sugar – an indulgence so zealous that the artist refers to sugar as ‘Mormon Heroin.’ His work functions as both celebration and satire of this ‘Mormon folly’ for sweets. He is quick to point out that it also operates in the larger context of America’s corresponding insatiable appetite for “just about everything; with its greed, materialism, rising obesity levels and contradictory obsessions with fast food, over-indulgence, fitness and body image.” Kent Christensen was born in Los Angeles in 1957. After graduating with honors from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena he gained prominence as a New York based illustrator in the 1990’s in the early 2000’s and has been represented by London’s Eleven gallery since 2006. Known for his collaborations with London shoe designer Camilla Elphick for several years beginning in 2014, he currently lives and works in Salt Lake City and London. His work is included in many public and private collections internationally.
