Biography
Biography
Chris Sauter is a visual artist based in San Antonio, TX. He works across-media primarily in sculpture, installation, drawing, and video. Pulling from varied sources such as agriculture, history, science, and religion his work addresses the links between material and meaning, biology and belief, the past and present. He has exhibited across the United States, Mexico and Europe. His works have been featured at the McNay Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Kohler Art Center, the Musee d’Art Moderne Saint-Etienne, France, The Drawing Center in New York, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1. Sauter has been a resident artist at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin and Artpace, San Antonio. He is a member of M12, a collective of creative practitioners focused on rural issues. Sauter is associate professor of instruction at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is a local arts advocate, volunteering at various local non-profit arts organizations. He is a long-time designer and performer for Cornyation, a yearly satirical production benefitting local LGBT and youth organizations.
Artist Statement
Artist Statement
Drawing from varied sources such as agriculture, history, science, and religion, my work explores the links between material and meaning, biology and culture, the present and the past. I want to know how the world works; why things are the way they are. So, I peel back the layers to see the insides, treating objects as materials and materials as carriers of meaning. I trace paths from natural phenomena, across locales, through cultural systems, and deep into the body to reveal motivations and to connect actions and environments outside of the body with processes inside the body. Working across media, this practice results in objects, environments, and images, that often blur the boundaries between disciplines and collapse popular dichotomies into multifaceted wholes. Underneath all this work is an attempt to understand my own identity as a gay man living at this moment, in this place, and to position myself within this vast timeline.