Christopher Horder Australia, b. 1976

Lives and works in sydney, NSW, Australia

Christopher Horder is a Sydney-based painter whose practice has developed over more than two decades of exhibition in Australia and internationally. Working through an intuitive and materially driven process, Horder explores the unstable territory between control and chance, abstraction and the natural world, and the physical properties of paint and its capacity to evoke forces beyond the visible.

Developing a distinctive language of staining, pouring, layering and gestural intervention, his paintings are less representations of landscape than encounters with it: atmospheric, primordial and often otherworldly. Pigment becomes both subject and agent, moving across the surface through gravity, fluidity and chance, while the artist intervenes selectively to shape and redirect its trajectory. 

Horder completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the National Art School, Sydney. He has been a finalist in a number of major Australian art prizes and has received the Reg Richardson Travelling Art Scholarship and the Young Emerging Artist Award at the Mosman Art Prize, among other distinctions. His work has been presented in significant group exhibitions and art fairs in Australia and overseas, including Aotearoa Art Fair in Auckland, Melbourne Art Fair and exhibitions in Berlin. 

Horder's work is held in public, corporate and private collections in Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, including the Judith Neilson Collection and St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney. His practice has been the subject of extensive critical and media coverage, including writing in The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Art Collector, Art Monthly Australia and Qantas Magazine.