CHRIS STEVENS

Contact: chrispstevens@mac.com

In a world saturated with media images and hollow archetypes, Chris Stevens has quietly and persistently forged a practice that probes beneath surface appearances. His paintings, grounded in figuration yet charged with social commentary and painterly abstraction, defy conventional expectations of portraiture. Rather than simply capturing likeness, Stevens’ work interrogates identity its formation, projection, and disruption within the cultural and political frameworks of class, race, gender, and place.

Graduating from the University of Reading in 1978 with a degree in Fine Art, Stevens began exhibiting in a Britain grappling with rapid societal changes. From the outset, his work engaged directly with these transformations. Early residencies, notably at Sunderland Football Club and Birmingham International Airport under the auspices of the Arts Council, positioned him in environments often overlooked by the art world working-class spaces, transitory zones, places thick with sociopolitical tension. These formative experiences continue to echo through his paintings, where urban decay, peripheral figures, and psychologically charged interiors provide fertile ground for exploring identity as lived and performed.

Central to Stevens’ practice is a sustained interest in challenging stereotypes, particularly those perpetuated by the media. His subjects friends, family members, and acquaintances are not anonymous stand-ins, but rather complex individuals whose specificity resists flattening. Stevens transforms the familiar into the archetypal, then back again, creating a dynamic tension between the personal and the symbolic. His figures often appear isolated against ambiguous or desolate backdrops, yet these sparse environments are never empty. Rather, they pulse with the residue of narrative street corners,

housing estates, advertising fragments, and interior signs of personal history. The effect is both intimate and estranged, as if the viewer is invited into a private world laced with broader cultural resonances.

While Stevens is frequently described as a realist, this term does little justice to the nuanced visual language he has developed.

His realism is not mimetic but psychological. It distorts in order to clarify. Echoes of Bacon, Freud, and Auerbach might be felt, yet Stevens’ approach is more grounded in the everyday, more contemporary in its critique. He is equally attentive to the expressive potential of paint itself often employing a restrained, almost austere palette, juxtaposed with moments of gestural boldness or unexpected colour that punctuate the surface and open up emotional undercurrents.

This dialogue between content and form between figure and ground, realism and abstraction, subject and stereotype—is what gives Stevens’ work its force. His figures do not simply sit for us; they confront us. They ask us to consider who we see and why. What assumptions do we bring to their bodies, their dress, their environments? What stories do we impose on them before they have spoken?

Throughout his career, Stevens has shown in major venues across the UK and Europe, with solo and group exhibitions in London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Swansea, and beyond. Notable exhibitions include REALITY: Modern & Contemporary British Paintingat the Sainsbury Centre and the Walker Art Gallery, where he was shown alongside Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Paula Rego; andThe Poetry of the Realat Beaux Arts, London, where he exhibited with David Hockney and Frank Auerbach. Such company attests not only to the technical calibre of his work but also to its conceptual weight.

Stevens’ work has been acquired by numerous public and private collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Wales, Unilever, and the Galerija Portreta in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His paintings have found audiences across continents from the UK to South Africa, from Spain to Los Angeles.

In addition to painting, Stevens has curated exhibitions that reflect his commitment to broadening the field of contemporary figurative painting. Most notably, he curated REALITY(2014–2015), bringing together artists whose work reclaims figuration as a critical, politically engaged practice.

Stevens’ ongoing relocation between the UK and southern France in recent years has further enriched his perspective, bringing into focus the cultural contrasts and continuities between different European contexts. His recent exhibitions in France, Belgium, and Germany such asEuropas Meisterat the German Football Museum andCaunes en Personnein the historic Abbaye de Caunes-Minervois speak to his continued relevance and adaptability as an artist attuned to place and people.

In our image-saturated age, Chris Stevens’ paintings remind us that representation matters not only in how it depicts, but in how it challenges, questions, and transforms. His work doesn’t seek easy resolution or spectacle; rather, it insists on the dignity of complexity. Each painting is a quiet confrontation a negotiation between viewer and subject, myth and reality, paint and perception.

Stevens has never shied away from the difficult or the overlooked. He paints not just what is seen, but what is assumed what is feared, celebrated, ignored. And in doing so, he invites us to reconsider the narratives we consume and the identities we inhabit.

Les Courtals studio, Caunes Minervois, France