Location: Petaluma, CA
Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Installation
Website: art.sfsu.edu
Chris Finley was born in 1971 in Carmel, California, and grew up in Petaluma, attending Casa Grande High School before moving south to study art. He earned a BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1993 on scholarship, and mounted six exhibitions in Los Angeles galleries in quick succession. Finding the pace and scale of Southern California incompatible with the isolation his work demanded, he returned to his native Sonoma County in 1995, eventually converting a chicken barn in Sebastopol into his studio and settling nearby in Penngrove.
In 1998 Finley received the SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, resulting in a solo exhibition at the museum in early 1999. He went on to receive a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation in 2003 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2010. He is a Professor of Art at San Francisco State University, where he has taught for over two decades while continuing to live and work in Sonoma County.
Finley’s work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MASS MoCA, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, and SFMOMA, among others. His work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times, and is discussed in Phaidon’s Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting. In 2021 he had his first European solo exhibition, Realtors, at Galerie Richard in Paris.
Finley trained as a sign painter and applies that background literally, working in vintage glossy sign enamel on canvas over wood panel. His early sculptures and installations invite viewers to perform prescribed physical rituals — climbing, bouncing, or navigating obstacle courses — to uncover hidden narrative layers within stacked and arranged groupings of everyday objects, drawing on the logic of video games and pop culture. His paintings take a parallel, more recent turn toward distorted portraiture: images of world-record holders, politicians, and, in his Realtors series, real estate agents, digitally warped through dozens of iterations in Adobe Illustrator before being hand-painted in flat, glossy color. The results recall the Futurists’ fascination with speed and technology while critiquing a media-saturated, economically stratified present — Finley has cited the housing pressures reshaping the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives and teaches, as a direct influence on the Realtors paintings.
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