Christopher Cristóbal Newberry was born in Mexico City on 15.11.51 – a palindrome. Speculatively, this may be why he has been fascinated by symmetry, repetitiveness, cycles and change and progression through dialectics and complementarity.
He attended 11 different schools in Mexico and the USA before enrolling at the Universidad Ibero Americana where he read Communication Science.
In early 1976 he came to travel in Europe on a one-way air ticket. He worked and hitchhiked for several months. Down to only £5 in his pocket, he hitched a ride from Paris to London, where he had been told he could always find a job. He did. The very first day. Except for a time in Mexico between 1981 and 1985, he has lived in Britain ever since.
This is a list of his activities more or less in chronological order from age 14:
Tobacco shop attendant. Teacher of English as a foreign language. Teacher of Economics. Media analyst for the Ministry of Communications. Youth hostel worker. Peat-piler and abattoir gut-cutter and cleanser in Sweden. Housing adviser in London. Magazine editor. Script writer. Educational television producer. Documentary film maker. Graphic designer. Voiceover artist. Writer. Father. Driver. Cook. And always photographer and image creator.
In general terms, his images are verisimilar – that is, they look like truth or reality, but are not. That is very much like a lot of today’s social media and politics, which oversimplify a complex world, presenting their simplified version as truth. In fact it is frequently an obfuscation at best, a lie at worst. They are messages designed to be believed rather than understood. The difference between that post-truth approach and his images is that his purpose is to invite viewers to see that they are false or exaggerated (see his essay, Striving for Imperfection at www.christophernewberry.com). His images are a distortion of reality in the sense that they are simplified to resemble what can only exist as Platonic ideals: Symmetry, straight lines, saturated colours . . . Euclidian geometric shapes. These shapes exist perfectly only in the mind not in nature, therefore his images cannot exist in reality.
HOWEVER, in the case of this particular submission he has taken historic photographs or illustrations which reflect 'Beliefs'. Beliefs which are defined as a feeling that something is true, but without any proof. Indeed many beliefs are sustained despite proof to the contrary. This is something all human beings suffer from. When those beliefs become essential for people to have in order to survive within their own tribe, or culture, or country – that is when they have become dangerous and have created havoc in the past . . . and in the present.
Recent Exhibitions
Camden Library in London;Creative Innovation Center in Taunton, Somerset, England;The Art House in Southampton, England;Hampshire Open Studios (traveling exhibition in the county of Hampshire, England);The Tower Arts Center in Winchester, England;Ten Days at the Laundry in Winchester, England;The Link Gallery at the University of Winchester;Creates Gallery at the Forest of Dean Heritage Centre, Gloucestershire, England;National Museum of Art in Constanta, Romania September 2019;Dean Clough Art Galleries, Halifax, West Yorkshire, March 2020;The Light Room, Alresford, Hampshire, 2022.ARC, Winchester, 2023Oxmarket Contemporary Art Gallery, Chichester, East Sussex
He is author of two books on architecture and social history: Look Up! Winchester and Look Up! Salisbury. Look Up! Oxford is in development.
He has a partner and two sons, now young men.
