Christopher Knowles

Bridget Donahue is pleased to present the gallery’s second solo exhibition with New York-based artist Christopher Knowles (b. 1959). Knowles is a poet, performer and visual artist whose output includes text, sound, typing, painting, drawing, sculpture and recorded performance — including works completed in collaboration with esteemed theater director Robert Wilson.

Christopher Knowles: The Rainbow Lego Show focuses on new Lego sculptures and assemblages made as recently as this year, 2025, and as early as 1982. For the past four decades Knowles has constructed and arranged recurring symbols: text, towers, lists, grids, graphs, diamonds, trees, windows, clocks, flags, stripes, countdowns, and balloons. This exhibition offers a specific opportunity — for Knowles and his audience — to admire a vibrant landscape of unfixed Lego works simultaneously.

Exhibition highlights include the latest drawing from an ongoing drawing series in-memorium: “The Life and Times of…” here it is for Jimmy Carter (2025); a diptych painting that details Knowles’ triumphant sequence: I Won the Simon game on Thursday October 27th 2022 (2023), and an installation of the artist’s personal collection of alarm clocks (1974-2018). Three works on view reference Knowles’ collaborations with cinematographer Richard Rutkowski: two marker-drawn stills from their film Sunshine Superman (1987) — Christopher Knowles at the Typewriter, Sunshine Superman with Lego Flag (both 1995) and Backwards Watt with Lego Mask (1995) made for performative reading of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel Watt in 1995.

The Rainbow Lego Show presents a full range of the artists work in Legos: the largest, the earliest, the newest, the most complex and the most abstract. Knowles’ precision commits pattern and repetition to form. He memorializes performative structures of color and play, further revealing his mesmerizing logic.

Christopher Knowles has exhibited his works widely throughout the world at museums and galleries including a career survey in 2023: Stand: An Exhibition of the Works of Christopher Knowles, curated by Noah Khoshbin at Watermill Center, New York; Kunstverein Langenhagen, Hannover, Germany (2020); Fonoteca Nacional de México, Mexico City (2015); Christopher Knowles: In a Word a survey curated by Anthony Elms and Hilton Als at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2015) which traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (2017); The Sundance Kid is Beautiful, Louvre Museum, Paris (2013), Performing Garage, NY (2014), ICA, Philadelphia (2015), and Drawings and Typings, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (1985). Knowles has been included in important group exhibitions such as Artist’s Choice: Yto Barrada — A Raft, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021); Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., ICA London, UK (2009), Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008) Of Mice and Men the 4th Berlin Biennale curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnik; Berlin, Germany (2006); Knowles was represented by Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; Office Baroque, Brussels, Belgium; Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid and Barcelona, Spain; Holly Solomon Gallery, New York, New York; and has performed solo or as part of the Byrd Hoffman company extensively, at venues including: White Columns, New York; Thalia Theatre, Hamburg, Germany; The Kitchen, New York; and in touring duets with Robert Wilson the world-over.