The work of Chelsea Culprit explores the performance of gender in the labor market and the expression of gender in the natural world. The artist reinvents subjects and techniques of historical painting, recoding the latent symbols of patriarchy toward an expanded social imaginary. Composed of feelings as much as descriptions, Culprit’s work entangles representations of the body’s capacity for work, play, display, expression, the performed authenticity of identity, and the intractability of freedom and personal bondage. Moving freely between the pictorial imagery of folk art and the materiality of the real world, the artist works with various mediums including neon light, sculptural assemblage, and installation, while grounding the practice in wide explorations of painting. Culprit finds the painted subjects in characters who express their sexuality and gender with raucous freedom. These figures respond to the desire to live in a society where such freedoms could be possible. They exist after or outside of a male gaze and are sited in spaces where those expressions are possible: the nightclub, the garden, the forest. These bodies are rendered with hard edges, but also morph into one another, into plants, into abstract color fields, into objects on the kitchen table- they are the laborers and high priestesses of the artist’s life, and embody myths of becoming and the fantasies, or reimagined archetypes of the present, that lead us from the past, into the future.

Chelsea Culprit was born in Paducah, KY in 1984. The artist received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Art History from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Solo exhibitions of Culprit's work have taken place internationally, including at: Queer Thoughts in New York, NY; Morán Morán in Los Angeles, CA; and Revolver Galería in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Lima, Perú; among others. The artist's work has also been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including at: the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City; the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France; the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw in Poland; and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Australia; among others. Culprit's work has been featured in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and The Nation, among others. Culprit lives and works in Mexico City and New York.