Selected Media
Musee MagazineBorn in Manchester, England.
Lives and works in London.
Christopher Bucklow is a prominent British contemporary artist who works in various mediums and is best known for his photographs and paintings. He has been exhibiting internationally since 1996, with numerous solo and group exhibitions at prestigious institutions including the Photographers’ Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Christopher Bucklow is one of the leading figures of the contemporary British ‘cameraless’ photography movement. His other-worldly photographs of radiant men and women set against grounds of color are made through a complex multi-step process which begins with the artist projecting the shadow of his sitter on a large sheet of aluminum foil and tracing its outline. He then makes thousands of small pinholes in the foil silhouette. Using a contraption of his own device that places the foil over a large sheet of photographic paper, Bucklow then wheels his homemade “camera” out into daylight and pulls the “shutter” to briefly expose the paper to direct sunlight. Thus each finished picture becomes a unique photogram silhouette composed of thousands of pinhole photographs of the sun. The intensity of light on a given day and the length of exposure create unique color variations on how the resulting piece appears.
Strongly influenced by Carl Jung’s theory of the Anima and Animus, Bucklow’s Guest works explores the idea of the repressed parts of the male and female psyche feature repeatedly throughout his work. As one of the most innovative artists working in the UK today, Bucklow’s work can be placed within a continued tradition of British photographers who have since the early 1990’s taken the art of the photograph into ever more novel, interesting, and technically and conceptually challenging territory.
Bucklow’s work is held in numerous important public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Museum of Modern Art,San Francisco and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.
