Christian Narkiewicz-Laine
Christian Narkiewicz-Laine is a Finnish/Lithuanian/American painter, sculptor, architect, and poet.
He was educated as an architect at The University of Strasbourg in France and studies archaeology at the American School of Archaeology. He completed his degree at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois and studies print making at the Evanston Art Center. He finished his education in art at The American Academy in Rome.
Narkiewicz-Laine’s early works (1985-2005) are characterized as being Neo-Expressionist, particularly dominated by landscape paintings, drawing upon a variety of themes including the mythological, the cultural, the historical, the nationalist, and the erotic. He used materials other than paint—such as straw, lead, dirt, and sand—and was particularly interested in their innate expressive characteristics, as in what happened to those materials when they burned. In the case of this work, he utilized straw, which becomes ash when burned.
Like other Neo-Expressionist painters, Narkiewicz-Laine summons mythic themes executed with compelling methods and emotions in order to explore what is possible through art.
After 2005, his work shifted with an explosion of the palette and became intensely political. Gone were the dark, brutal and somber landscapes from the previous century in exchange for more abstract subjects and ideas. He continued to experiment with materials using recycled plastic, recycled machines, and anything ephemeral like smoke.
A lot of the work incorporate kitsch materials and subjects. In one museum exhibition he stood on a podium dressed as an ISIS fighter or an Ebola doctor.
Later, in the 2010s, he worked in glass creating enormous 30-inch vessels based on baroque influences and Orientalist and Arabic culture.
His later works now incorporate Arabic script and influenced by Turkish and Near and Middle East art.
In 2017, London’s The Times and Sunday Times called him “one of the most prominent artists in the United States.”
Narkiewicz-Laine is also known for his poetic writings, publishing numerous books of poetry and prose.
In 2014, his fourth book of poetry, Rings Around Saturn,was published, and he was heralded as one of the most influential contemporary Scandinavian poets today at the Vilnius Book Fair. The book was nominated for a 2015 Pulitzer Prize.
Upon the publication of his book, Baltic Hours: A Collection of Poems, Mohammad Yusuf, the Art, Architecture and Literary Critic for the United Arab Emirates’ The Gulf Today compared Narkiewicz-Laine to the epic Swedish Gothicismus movement and wrote: “The image of a lonely traveler reduced to want yet carrying on with life, much like an [Roald] Amundsen or [Robert Falcon] Scott, is heroic.”