Kris Knight

Kris Knight is a Canadian painter born in 1980 in Windsor, Ontario, and based in Toronto. He studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCADU), specializing in Painting and Drawing with minors in Curating and Criticism, graduating in 2003. His work explores the representation of masculinity in its multiple forms — tenderness, vulnerability, ambiguity — through romantic and atmospheric figurative portraits of androgynous subjects oscillating between adolescence and adulthood. Influenced by 18th-century French painting, Romanticism and Symbolism, Knight builds intimate worlds charged with personal nostalgia and autobiographical memory. In 2014 he collaborated with Gucci — whose creative director Frida Giannini used his work as inspiration for the Fall/Winter 2014-15 collection — and has appeared on the cover of Harper's Bazaar and in Interview Magazine. His work is held in collections at RBC, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the 21C Museum.