Chris Barboi is a ceramicist and painter living in Evanston. Chris produces porcelain art pottery, as well as gouache/mixed media on paper paintings technically focusing on the tension that comes with whether or not a work of art can or can not be too perfectionistic. He hopes his works to be appreciated as baroque and ambiguous, and also for its springlike qualities. He sees himself as a ceramicist first and foremost, with painting being an extension of his ceramics practice.
Chris has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art, and the DePaul Art Museum. He believes this work experience was a crucial part of his art education, as well as going to a ceramics studio regularly as a teenager where he eventually taught wheelthrowing workshops.
Chris wants gouache and watercolor paintings to have more attention in contemporary painting as well as these mediums executed on a large scale and on paper. You can see how his use of ceramic decoration materials translates to his works on paper, but in a more maximalist way. All of his paintings are titled the date they were started, with a rotating date stamp in the composition signifying this.
