christopher winter (1968)
Contemporary Artist Speculative Realism
Chris in his Berlin studio Photo: Raven © 2025
“I think painting should manifest life, celebrate it and be exuberant. When I work on a canvas I’m drawing on my own mysterious and strange experiences - things that hang at the periphery of my vision that are worthy of becoming art. They may be provocative or possess an uncanny resonance – offering up questions that leave the viewer wondering. What if…? Is one of my favourite questions.”
Christopher Winter (1968) is a British painter and installation artist. He lives and works in Berlin and Hastings, UK. Primarily, literature, folklore and science influence his work. Winter’s vibrant paintings are mysterious yet often question the nature of our contemporary reality.
He studied at Camberwell School of Art (BA Fine Art) and under Professor Fritz Schwegler at Düsseldorf Art Academy. In October 2021 he had a solo exhibition “Archipelago of the Mind” in Berlin at ZAK – Center for Contemporary Art that has travelled to Museum Heylshof in Worms, Germany in June 2023. He also exhibited in “Other Worlds Than This” in June 2022 with Salvador Dali and Giorgio de Chirico at the Nassau County Museum, New York.
He has exhibited worldwide in museums and galleries. His work is in many private collections (including the Rothschild and Borghese families) and public collections which include AMMA Foundation, Mexico City; Berlinische Galerie Museum for Modern Art, Berlin; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany and The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, New York, USA.
In 2015, Kerber Verlag published a large monograph of Winter’s work to mark 20 years of painting in Germany titled “Dizzyland. 20 Years in Germany”. In 2021, Kerber published a second monograph titled “Archipelago of the Mind” in conjunction with his exhibition at ZAK Center of Contemporary Art in Berlin.
Edelman Arts Gallery in New York, in collaboration with TrafficArt presented 4 significant solo shows including installations exhibition. In 2008 he re-invisioned a 4 story brownstone on Manhattan’s upper east side into a living and breathing haunted house ,
His latest series “Super Nature” evokes the experiences of humans in the natural world. The paintings explore the pure reverie of personal encounters and the wonder of the untamed at first hand. Many of my paintings portray solitary figures in a kind of ecstasy, heightened by a connection to the wild. Acrylic paint is employed in a vibrant colour field technique in order to increase this intensity of feeling. The fragility of the environment and its constant changing character, the planet plummeting through space to its possible desecration by our own hands is an echo that he presents in the landscapes.
Instagram: christopher_winter_
Artist Website: http://www.christopher-winter.com/
Christopher Winter | Unnatural History: Huxley’s Guide to Switzerland, 2011 | Acrylic on canvas | 51 ¼ x 90 ½ in. (130 x 230 cm)
Through painting and drawing, both abstract and figurative, also through performances, installations and sculpture Christopher Winter reflects on his experience of contemporary reality. Often concepts drawn from folklore and fairy tales are woven together with science and philosophical threads, ultimately depicting narratives that are influenced by real and virtual worlds. In the series of works “Speculative Realism” Winter combined his figurative and abstract painting with installation, thus broadening his understanding of space and painting and extending his narratives beyond the canvas. Some series include passionate explorations of the primordial forest, the brutality of German fairytales and stories of innocence and experience. In his séance performances he “channels” the spirits of dead artists and produces their drawings – thus connecting to the possibility of “other” worlds. Quantum theories of our universe and the boundaries of human thought fascinate him and have resulted in installations like “Mirror World Space Collider” (2018) and paintings like “Space Time Reality” (2016).
Christopher Winter’s singular paintings remind us that, once upon a time, art and magic emerged simultaneously, indeed were one and the same. Caves in the Paleolithic era were not clean, well-lighted spaces and cave paintings were not viewed in the detached, observer-and-observed way we now regard art. They were magic in which viewers were participants. The first paintings were likely experienced as genuinely living entities, gateways into the spirit world, the mind’s own terra incognita. 32,000 years on, give or take a deca-millenium, we find ourselves in that terra incognita we know as the present, on a darkly magical mystery tour with artist magician Christopher Winter as our guide. This time round, Winter pulls more than a few rabbits from his prestidigitator’s hat, with one painting of a rabbit emerging from the magician’s topper, and several paintings of domesticated fauna leaping through the skies. Aloft before demure storybook mountain valleys, these gravity-defying creatures are, well, hare-raising. — Fayette Hickox
Christopher Winter | Spook-a-rama | Graphite on paper (size tk)
Christopher Winter | If Things Get Real, 2004 |Acrylic on canvas |59 x 43 in. (150 x 110 cm)
Christopher Winter | Hybrid I, 2012 |Acrylic on canvas | 31 x 43 in. (80 x 130 cm)
Christopher Winter | Hybrid II, 2012 |Acrylic on canvas | 31 x 43 in. (80 x 130 cm)
