Chris Dorosz

Chris Dorosz is a Canadian-American artist who divides his time between San Francisco and Winnipeg. He completed a BFA at Concordia University in Montreal in 1994 and an MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in 1997, where he received the Joseph Beuys Memorial Scholarship. In 2003 he won the Canadian Art and Royal Bank of Canada New Painting Competition. Dorosz currently teaches color theory, design, and painting at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Dorosz has cultivated a hybrid painting-sculpture-photographic practice through which he explores the mutability of the physical world. His work centers on two primary series: the Staple Series and the Paint Drop Series. The Staple Series developed from his desire to find new ways of putting paint onto a support without using a brush. Inspired by piles of tiny staples discarded after canvases were removed from their stretchers, he arranges the metal bits into grids and fills them with different colored pigments. "The staples were at first a pedestrian object," Dorosz explains, "but now I see them as perfectly sized units that represent a modern material juxtaposed against the idea of history."

The Paint Drop Series involves assembling tiny plastic tubes filled with colored drops of pigment into tightly supported groupings that form recognizable images, usually of small groups or figures. Dorosz views paint drops as "analogous to the building blocks that make up the human body (DNA) or even its mimetic representation (the pixel)." He describes his approach: "Paint can be a metaphor for the physical world. It could be atoms, mud, or paint — you become the creator." In his Stasis series, Dorosz selects figure groupings from media streams and translates them into droplets of paint suspended on clear vertical rods, creating three-dimensional, photo-inspired objects that slip between painting and sculpture.

Dorosz has exhibited across North America in solo exhibitions including the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Mission 17 Gallery in San Francisco, the Canadian Clay and Glass Museum, and Mayberry Fine Art in Winnipeg. His work has been featured in group shows in Europe, the United States, and Canada, including the Royal College of Art in Edinburgh, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, and Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery in Halifax. His practice has been supported by multiple Canada Council for the Arts grants from 1998 to 2018, as well as Manitoba Arts Council funding.