Christopher Skura is a visual artist living in New York City and his work has been exhibited throughout the United States. He holds a degree in painting and drawing and a professional certificate in sculpture from the Ringling College of Art and Design and a degree in liberal arts from New York University. In 1989 he was awarded The Robert Rauschenberg Change Grant for work completed that year.
Skura studied ceramic sculpture with Peter Gourfain at Greenwich House Pottery, drawing with Richard Barnet, Nicki Orbach and Leonid Gervits at The Art Students League of New York, stained-glass design and construction at The Peters Valley School of Craft, painting and ceramics at The Florida Gulf Coast Art Center/ Belleair and philosophy with Paul Edwards at The New School University.
His work has been exhibited at K.S. Art, 440 Gallery, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Thread Waxing Space, Cynthia Broan Gallery, The Alternative Museum, and New York University/ 80 WSE Gallery in New York City, and Dorsch Gallery, Art Lab 33, Rocket Projects and The Pulse Fair in Miami. Also at The Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, The Ringling Museum of Art, The St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, The Dunedin Fine Art Center, The Hunterdon Museum of Art, Alexandria Museum of Art, The Daytona Museum of Arts and Sciences, The Vero Beach Museum of Art, The Box Art Museum in Sweden, Florida State University Art Museum and The Payne Gallery at Moravian University to name just a few.
Skura’s most recent artworks were exhibited in a solo show of 30 works The Art Center Sarasota, a solo show of 40 works at the Dunedin Fine Art Center and at the Carter Burden Gallery, NYC. His work is influenced by jazz and street art and reference psychology, structural systems, sculpture, emergence theory and the architecture of the human body. Improvisation and freehand drawing are emphasized. Some of Skura’s forms are organic and plant-like but others suggest the machinery of a man-made environment. This duality reflects his visual experiences growing up in the lush Florida landscape and his current life living and working in Manhattan as a paper art conservator.
http://alvarezconservation.com/experience/
Other experience working in the studios of artists John Chamberlain and Hunt Slonem and staff positions at The Guggenheim Museum/ SoHo and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York University's Art Museum/ Grey Art and The Ringling Museum of Art, gave him the unique opportunity to fabricate and construct many artworks for other national and international artists.
In 2011, Skura and clay artist Julie Knight, built JAKPOT Ceramic Studios in the Catskill Mountains outside of Woodstock, NY where they sometimes collaborate.
https://julie-knight.squarespace.com/
“Christopher Skura creates systems. Systems thrive or fail based on the connectedness of its parts and Skura's work is no different. Although improvised and free at their inception, his drawings evolve into technological and biological architecture through his ability to make contrasting elements work together seamlessly. Christopher Skura takes the viewer on a behind-the-scenes voyage through a complex imaginative system of shape, theory and color. He lives and works in New York, NY.”
Jonathan Greene/ Curator/ Hunterdon Art Museum in 2012
“Looking around Skura’s Soho workshop, it is no wonder what inspires the images he makes. Tools, jars of colored pencils, brushes and ink bottles are juxtaposed with low hanging, kicking and leaky pipes. It is a hodge-podge of street finds and scavenged hardware that straddles a definition between gritty and homely. In a word, eclectic, like Skura. In his work, Boxy mechanical shapes join together and twist apart as they flow organically across the surface. Thought bubbles emerge and grow more bubbles. Some forms are pushed into the background with a pebbly white haze. If one thing is constant concerning this work, it is Skura’s lack of affinity to a single medium or esthetic tool; it appears to be a free-for-all determined to solve itself. Skura’s work is a thoughtful, exploratory art suspicious of rules and willing to admit mistakes. Starting with specific forms and growing into a general composition, Skura compromises and edits these pictures through a process that reveals itself to the viewer. Mistakes are simply pushed to the background and worked over. His drawings are improvisation; a search for resolution. It comes from an understanding that art making does not solve problems, but quite oppositely, poses more questions. It is this constant questioning and reevaluation that lends honestly to his drawings.”
Jason Marquis/ Gallerist/ Los Angeles CA
“Skura causes us to investigate the recognizable and unrecognizable and to make sense of what is real and illusionary as well as what is memory and what is construction”
Mark Ormond/ Curator/ Sarasota, FL
“Skura’s drawings are populated by a complex web of tiny blocks connected chemical-model style and stacked layer upon layer. Tiny symbols and building blocks, scattered about the paper that reach for each other connect in strings or seek isolation, bringing to mind not only the fabric of chemicals and molecules, but that of political, cultural and social spheres.”
Damarys Ocana/ New Miami Times/ Miami, FL