Chris Mansour
About
Chris Mansour is a writer, curator, and Senior Director at Harper’s, where he has spent more than twelve years working across exhibition programming, artist development, collector relationships, and sales strategy. During his tenure, he has helped introduce and develop artists and estates within the gallery’s program, including the Iria Leino Estate, JJ Manford, Allie McGhee, John Joseph Mitchell, Ellen Sibers, and Chloe West. Mansour received an MFA with honors from Parsons School of Design and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works between New York City and East Hampton, NY.
This website presents a selection of his writing and curatorial projects produced in connection with exhibitions at Harper’s in New York, East Hampton, and Los Angeles.
Selected Writing
JJ Manford + James Rosenquist
"Yet both artists share a proclivity toward heightened chroma and a surrealist edge. Manford’s compositions take greater liberties with spatial coherence, assembling convergent rooms that resist resolution into a singular environment . . . Similarly, Rosenquist’s doll faces are at once direct and estranged, their enlarged features drawing in the viewer while remaining distanced by their synthetic surfaces."
Noel W Anderson: Courtside Sermon
"The figures he portrays, alongside the techniques that give them shape, appear simultaneously exalted and unsettled, ultimately asking whether Black culture can be understood as a stable category as it is broadcast through the entertainment industry."
Iria Leino: 1968–1970
"Although Leino was exceptionally ambitious, foregrounding a rigorous painterly practice comparable to her contemporaries, the artist repeatedly rejected the idea of transforming her creations into a professional endeavor. She ultimately believed that her creative pursuits served a higher metaphysical purpose, one that could not be fulfilled by the materialistic gains of fame and commercial recognition."
Allie McGhee: Parallax
"He imaginatively pairs motifs like African tribal masks, the Ubangi figure, free jazz, and his own personal symbol, the Banana Moon Horn, with evocative depictions of the everlasting: marks resembling prehistoric cave paintings and imagery that recalls the vast celestial sky. In this unique combination of idioms, McGhee embraces modernist techniques pioneered by the Cubists and Abstract Expressionists, which bring out the fullest potential of paint as material—its viscous, tactile, and malleable qualities."
Jeremy Lawson: Compound
"Treating each piece as if it has commanding powers over his decision-making, Lawson wrestles with recalcitrant materials in order to discover the painting’s aesthetic resolution. Often failing in the early stages—and at times failing altogether—he dutifully starts anew if he suspects that his own hand has become overly dominant. Whenever these moments occur, he must 'break the piece and rework it for the painting to come into its own,' as Lawson himself puts it."
Carlos Jacanamijoy: Gratitud
"Jacanamijoy pivoted towards non-representational abstraction and color field painting for its universalizing appeal and radical openness. Often working on supports that far exceed human scale, his canvases are immersive experiences that beckon the audience to enter into his illusionistic tableaux. Vibrant red, amber, and viridescent hues swirl atop navy or powder blue washes that appear to glow from within. The amorphic shapes look as if they are spontaneously weaving in and out of each other, creating a surface that pulses like a living organism or bursts open like a galactic dreamscape."
Susumu Kamijo: How Was Your Summer?
"Conceptualizing his pictures as living things, Kamijo believes that the poodles in this latest series have transmogrified into something else entirely: their somas have become empty vessels that host unknown sentient organisms, morphing from domesticated pets to wild beasts. How Was Your Summer? subverts the lighthearted portrayal of poodles as precious show dogs, bringing unsettling aspects of this motif to the surface."
Scott Kahn: Afternoon of a Faun
"Kahn seamlessly blends interior and exterior worlds to create intricately detailed dreamscapes, giving shape to the elusive character of the subconscious through natural forms. In contrast to the enigmatic vignettes conjured by emotions, memories, and fleeting impressions, all elements in his scenes are executed with fastidious precision; each blade of grass, star in the sky, and ripple in the sea is tidily rendered, suggesting a sensuous lucidity to these otherworldly realms."
Contact
chris.d.mansour [at] gmail [dot] com