Chris Natrop, Ultraviolet Super Bloom, 2024, acrylic on paper, 45.75 x 35.5 inches

Chris Natrop
Any Way Shape Or Form
December 4, 2024, to January 25, 2025

Artist Reception
4pm to 6pm
Saturday, December 7

NANCY TOOMEY FINE ART
1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco

Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Chris Natrop titled Any Way Shape Or Form on view from December 4, 2024, to January 25, 2025. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment–please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038.

The public is invited to meet artist Chris Natrop at the gallery on Saturday, December 7, from 4pm to 6pm.

Chris Natrop, Ultraviolet Wood Land, 2024, acrylic on paper, 35.25 x 55.25 inches

Chris Natrop’s exhibition Any Way Shape Or Form consists of thirteen framed works of hand-cut paper and acrylic paint landscapes, all unsettled places born from personal, emotional upheaval. Through vagaries of chance, guided by intuition, Natrop creates worlds that reflect a shifting psychological backdrop.

Chris Natrop, Crystal Ponder Undertone, 2024, acrylic on paper, 58 x 51 inches

In Natrop’s art, perceptions collapse into two-dimensional space where the fractured picture plane resolves into sharp compositions, each cutout landscape revealing a bright heart shining through a tangle of thought, worry, and love.

Chris Natrop, Grey Garden Singularity, 2024, acrylic on paper, 46.75 x 41 inches

Instinctively shaped without conscious analysis, Natrop’s cut-paper works embody a meandering mental landscape. The process itself is inseparable from the result, making the work both the journey and the destination.

Chris Natrop, Bayou Spinout Redux 1 and 2, 2024, acrylic on paper, 38.5 x 38.5 inches each

“My studio practice is centered on the act of cutting paper,” says Natrop. “Executed free form and exclusively with a knife, it has evolved into a stream-of-consciousness drawing technique, a meditation of repetition and reduction. Immediate cutting decisions and lack of pre-planning allow for the discovery of ambiguous silhouetted imagery that surfaces as interconnected landscapes. Individual cut-paper-objects stand alone or are fabricated into other two-dimensional formats. All elements come together in various combinations, creating larger multifaceted installations: worlds in which light, shadow, and form coalesce into equilibrium.”

Chris Natrop

Born in 1967 in Milwaukee, Chris Natrop grew up in Hartland, Wisconsin, and relocated to California after receiving his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992. Cutting is the hallmark of Natrop’s practice. Known for his immersive room-sized installations and large-scale projects, his unique cutting method evolved some twenty years ago out of the process of charcoal drawing. His idiosyncratic method, using an industrial utility knife on vertically mounted swaths of paper, is foundational to his unique ability, and a cornerstone to the broader cut paper movement in the art world today. Natrop has roots in San Francisco from the 90’s to early 2000’s where he lived and worked. His entire process and technique blossomed in his Mission studio which was featured in the local PBS program “Spark” in 2004. In the proceeding years, before relocating to Los Angeles, Natrop was a fixture at the Headlands Center for the Arts, having taken over the Bowling Alley Building as an Affiliate Artist where he mounted his first site-specific cut paper installations. He has shown his work throughout the US and Europe and has recently completed a series of commissioned public sculptures in New York, Dubai, China, Houston, and Los Angeles. In 2016 he completed site specific works for Facebook’s Playa Vista and Menlo Park campuses. In 2020 Natrop completed a major public sculpture commissioned by the County of Los Angeles. Natrop is a recipient of several awards, including the Pulse Prize at Pulse New York, and is included in numerous public and private collections.

Any Way Shape Or Form is Chris Natrop’s third solo exhibition at Nancy Toomey Fine Art.