Christopher Astley

b.1965, Lansing, MI, US
Lives and works in New York, NY, US

Christopher Astley is a contemporary painter whose work investigates the unstable nature of reality, drawing on themes of time, space, memory, and perception. His ongoing Terrain series (2020–) presents fractured, collaged landscapes that hover between abstraction and representation, reflecting both the natural world and the inner workings of thought, language, and memory. Influenced by encounters with cognitive disruption and memory loss, Astley uses painting as a way to translate the instability of consciousness into visual form. Earlier works explored the chaos and unreality of war, depicting ghostly battles that questioned how history is perceived and constructed. Referencing Cubism, Chinese landscape painting, and even Winsor McCay’s dreamlike cartoons, Astley’s practice embraces fragmentation and simultaneity. His paintings serve as meditations on perception, mortality, and human precarity, offering viewers not fixed images of the world but shifting terrains of consciousness and imagination.

Christopher Astley (b. 1965, lives and works in New York, NY, US) studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. He has had solo exhibitions with Martos Gallery, New York, NY, US; Tracy Williams Ltd., New York, NY, US; Leo Koenig, New York, NY, US and Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts, New York, NY, US. Selected group exhibitions wer eheld with Hometown Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, US, Chamber, New York, NY, US; Martos Gallery, New York, NY, US and The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL, US. Astley’s work has been featured in Cultured Magazine, Art in America, The New York Times, Interview Magazine, V Magazine, and Gotham Magazine.

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