Chris Temple lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.

Since the early 1980’s, Toronto-based artist, Chris Temple has been exploring the monumental aspects of urban landscape. Temple is fascinated by the way cities take shape and evolve over time. Temple manipulates the perspective of the streets, buildings and the industrial hinterlands, positioning the viewer either on the street level or on a building rooftop in the world’s most well known cities. Depicting the acute perspective of the buildings, without people, evokes the overwhelming sensation of alienation and dwarfism that we have all felt within a large city.

Temple’s work captures precise architectural details while evoking, through light and colour, the psychological impact of being in a given space. He examines structures that vie for attention in the urban landscape, and later paints them with lyric realism. The artist’s medium is well suited to his artistic vision. Over weeks, Temple often reworks the slow-drying oil paints. In this way, his paintings seem to grow much like the cities and structures they depict.

Like other artists before him, notably the photographer, Alfred Stieglitz and the painter, Edward Hopper, Temple encourages the viewer to look at their urban environments in new ways, to approach the familiar as if it were unknown, and to discover that the extraordinary exists within the common world.