Biography

Christopher Croft was born in Melbourne and attended the University High School. He studied Advertising Art and Painting at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Printmaking at the University of Tasmania with Udo Sellbach. Croft moved to Germany in the mid-1970s after his art studies in Australia, supported by a German Academic Exchange Scholarship. He studied with Prof. Rudolf Schoofs in Stuttgart. He was the first Australian guest artist at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. His artistic journey also took him to Kyoto and Tokyo with a scholarship from the Australia-Japan Foundation.

Following an extended period of lecturing in various Australian art schools including eight years working with Petr Herel in the Graphic Investigation Workshop at the Canberra School of Art, he moved back to Germany. His works have been shown in numerous galleries in France, Germany and Australia including Arts d’Australie - Stéphane Jacob in Paris, Gallery Levy in Hamburg, Galleries Michael Heufelder and Boutwell Schabrowsky in Munich, the former Stadia Graphics Gallery in Sydney and William Mora Galleries in Melbourne.

With his wife Claudia, whom he met and married in Munich, he spent twenty years living and working in various cities including Milan, Wellington, Paris and London. He now lives and works in Munich.

Statement

Christopher Croft’s works are informed by our modern civilization and media-saturated society. Old encyclopedias, archival records, memory-collectives of all sorts, James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, object-oriented ontology and the juristic rights of all forms of nature are amongst his ongoing interests and his reasons to sustain the making of images and objects. His works have narrative aspects that sometimes appear slightly humorous, sometimes critical, and occasionally ironic — without, however, being hurtful or exposing.

Christopher Croft expresses his love for detail in dialogue with a mastery of traditional materials and techniques such as oil, watercolour, drawing, etching, and object-making. His images and objects often seem to represent sayings or pieces of wisdom, inviting viewers on a visual journey of discovery. His extensive works are organised by motifs, objects, space and life forms showing the world as a museum, a place of accumulation, order, and preservation, akin to the memory of humanity: they tell stories and dreams, presenting the world as a connected whole.

Croft draws his motifs from his travels, different cultures, art history and literature — and from the strange poetry of our everyday absurdities. He creates mysterious, gentle and dreamlike atmospheres as metaphors for our subconscious. The enigmatic combinations of historical and cultural references in his works are reminders of the follies and dreams of the human condition.