Chris Hood

Chris Hood (b. 1984, Atlanta, Georgia) is an American artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. His painting practice is characterized by an enigmatic fusion of abstraction and figuration, exploring themes such as identity, memory, visual perception, and the tensions between the physical and the virtual. With a distinctive technical approach, Hood applies wet pigment to the reverse side of the canvas, allowing colors and shapes to seep through to the front. This method results in compositions with a “stained” effect that evokes both inside-out graphic t-shirts and liminal painterly surfaces, where the digital and the analog coexist in an ambiguous third dimension. In his practice, Hood draws from vernacular sources, humor, and an iconography rich in cultural references to provoke both visual and emotional responses. His works oscillate between clear figuration and wandering abstraction, creating often psychedelic or surreal scenes in which characters and colors interact across multiple narrative layers. Hood earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from Georgia State University and his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010. After his studies, he lived in New York, where he worked in various facets of the art world before settling in Los Angeles. He has held solo exhibitions at venues such as Lyles & King (New York), Eduardo Secci (Florence), Praz-Delavallade (Paris and Los Angeles), 68projects (Berlin), Mier Gallery (Los Angeles), and Galerie Bernard Ceysson (Geneva). His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions at institutions such as the Saatchi Gallery (London), The Museum of Museums (Seattle), VENUS (Los Angeles), Torrance Art Museum, Zuckerman Museum of Art (Atlanta), and CANADA (New York). In 2019, he was an artist-in-residence at 68projects (Berlin), in collaboration with Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House, where he produced a series influenced by the Berlin urban environment. In 2023, his work was selected for the Art in the Embassies program at the U.S. Embassy in Budapest. His work has been reviewed in publications such as Art in America, Hyperallergic, Galerie Magazine, ELEPHANT, Mousse Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, The Art Newspaper, and TimeOut New York. Chris Hood’s work continues to explore the intersections of the digital and the analog, the personal and the collective, solidifying his place as a prominent figure in the contemporary art landscape.