Chris Bond

Chris Bond is a creator and a character who operates within narrative scenarios designed to shift habitual response, feeling and expression. Perception, expectation and plausibility are skewed in the uncannily real worlds of Bond’s invention, where fictional artists, writers and organisations circulate, spawning documentary material that he regularly appropriates and recontextualises. In his closely-worked paintings and drawings these processes find an end in hand-made facsimiles of books, magazines, exhibition catalogues and correspondence. Within his installation practice he hijacks the conventions of museum display to convey unlikely, fantastic stories, where threatening, illusory forms creep at the edge of the real.

Bond has exhibited since 2000. He undertook a studio residency at Gertrude Contemporary in 2001, and has since featured in 23 solo and 130 curated exhibitions at venues including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Gertrude Contemporary, Blindside, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Bus Projects, Heide Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Samstag Museum, Adelaide. In 2013, he was awarded the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, in 2017 the BalletLab McMahon Contemporary Art Award and an Australia Council Art Development Grant.

Bond is represented by THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) Honours at RMIT in 1997 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts (Visual Art) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2018. He lives and works in Melbourne.