Robert Christie | Shuffle

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Robert Christie, "Playground," 2022

acrylic, plywood on canvas, 66" x 60 1/2. Courtesy of the Gallery.

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 19, 2-4 pm.

Art Placement is pleased to present Robert Christie’s latest exhibition, Shuffle. Christie is a prominent painter in Saskatoon who has made countless contributions to the arts in the city and beyond for more than fifty years. Emerging as a painter in the late 1960s when modernist formalism prevailed locally and internationally, Christie remains grounded in the fundamental elements of the medium. Like a deck of playing cards that can be shuffled into an incomprehensibly large number of unique combinations, the elements of painting offer Christie a similarly inexhaustible array of possibilities.

Robert Christie continues to “shuffle the deck” in his latest suite of geometric abstractions. His signature aesthetic remains reduced and minimal with an elegant simplicity that masks an underlying complexity. Christie is a painter who invests significant time and labour into his work. It is not uncommon for some pictures to remain in progress for months or even years and for their final outcomes to be drastically different in colour and composition from where they began. The layers of paint that accumulate in Christie’s paintings give a richness and character to the final surfaces, which are subtle but complex, rewarding those who look intently. Christie’s rigorous, discerning approach searches in each painting for an outcome that both surprises and sustains; an arrangement of shapes, colours, and textures that not only grabs our attention, but also holds it.

Robert Christie was born in Saskatoon in 1946. He studied at the University of Saskatchewan and was a frequent participant at the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops starting in 1969. His paintings have been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Canada since 1969 and his work is represented in both public and private collections throughout Canada and abroad.