LONDON.- For his first solo exhibition outside of the United States and his debut at Modern Art, Christopher Culver presents a new series of drawings based on the backwaters of Northern Florida and the borderlands of Texas, two psychically and politically charged regions afflicted by economic diminishment and visible disrepair. Titled Florida and Texas, the exhibition builds on Culver’s ongoing study of waning landscapes and the spectral architecture of postindustrial cities, documenting the artist’s passage through the disquieting edges of the American South.

Sourced from his own photographs, the drawings appear menacing and affective, bearing traces of invisible lives. They emerge through a process of accumulation and subtraction. Layers of charcoal and pastel leave the paper with a saturated, ashy finish redolent of film grain. We encounter a twilight world enveloped in haze, on the verge of disintegration. Often his drawings are set at night or in the darkness of movie theaters and shrouded tenements, but Florida and Texas brought Culver out into the harsh daylight to capture the oppressive sunshine.

The works presented here see the artist exploring the peripheral zones of the Sun Belt. In these desolate stretches, once bustling towns have been reduced to lifeless nodes in the global supply chain and uniform clusters of big-box stores, places where commodities circulate freely, humans are surveilled, animals are confined, and alienation gives way to resentment.

Freight trucks dot the landscape. These vehicles are symbols of just-in-time logistics, yet they appear motionless, inexplicably frozen. In The Problem with Worlds (2025), one sits idle on the side of the highway near the Rio Grande, the river that separates the United States from Mexico. On the outskirts of the busy trade corridor, stagnation creeps in, the foreboding stillness anticipating a future collapse. Power lines striate the sky above and connect unseen geographies. In this scorched holding zone, the hum of electricity is deafening.

North Florida forms the tropical counterpart of the Texas border region, a place where stagnation is also evident, but appears verdant and lush. Inland (2025) introduces us to the native plant life, tracing the topography of the overgrown bank of a retention pond. Sabal palms and oak trees covered with Spanish moss form a tangled wall of foliage. Messy plant growth occludes a sagging power line, suggesting that nature has begun to reclaim this hurricane-prone land.

Drawings of interiors and still lives offer a glimpse of quotidian existence in the changing region. In Grandmother’s Table (2025), pill bottles and paper plates form a makeshift altar on a table that floats in the void. A corner window casts light into this shadow world, illuminating the haunting arrangement and bathing the various palliatives in warmth. Elsewhere, animals are stuck in limbo. Shelter cats preen, curled up in cages, their shaky resignation is palpable.

Together, the works in the exhibition construct an interconnected reality, one that is uncanny and vacant, and shaped by hardship, myth, and conspiracy. As the heat presses down, the psychic landscape sows the seeds of paranoia and all that is solid melts into air. If this suspended world eludes language, then the drawings arrive at some semblance of truth. Redemption may be illusory in a conjuncture marked by crisis, but the sequence of visitations that Culver narrates maintains the oblique possibility of empathy.

– Matthew Grumbach

Christopher Culver was born in Miami in 1985 and lives and works in New York. Culver received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008, and his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. Selected solo exhibitions include Florida and Texas, Modern Art, London (2025); Unhome, American Art Catalogues, New York (2025); Tough Joy, Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (2024); Manhattan, Chapter NY, New York (2023); Interior, The Meeting, New York, The Problem with Worlds, A.D., New York (both 2021), Goodbye Houses, Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles (2017). Selected group exhibitions include: Scenes of Disclosure, Greene Naftali, New York (2025) A Vanished Wholeness, Modern Art, Paris (2025), DIANA Gallery, New York (2024); Pendulum, Winter Street Gallery, Edgartown (2023); The Prey and the Shadow, Crèvecoeur, Paris; Off-Kilter, Michael Benevento, Los Angeles; About Tegne, Collaborations, Copenhagen, New memories, ECHO, Cologne (all 2022), Some Say the Soul is Made of Wind, Downs & Ross, New York; and Who’s Afraid of the Great Indoors, Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles (both 2021).