It is with profound sadness that I share the passing of Chris Doyle-artist, collaborator, friend, and one of the most expansive creative people with whom I have had the privilege to work. Chris died suddenly on July 22, 2025. The loss is felt deeply by all of us at Catharine Clark Gallery, by past staff members who had the opportunity to get to know him, and by the artists represented by the gallery. We offer our condolences to all who knew and loved him. He was cherished and valued by the many communities that he touched and by the countless people-collectors, curators, and viewers-who supported and were moved by him and his work.
Photo: Catharine Clark, Chris Doyle, Emilie Clark, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY, 2014
I first met Chris at his Brooklyn studio in the early 2000s. My sister, the artist Emilie Clark, and her husband, the poet and scholar Lytle Shaw, encouraged me to see his work. They remained close with him until his death. In 2009, Chris and I fortuitously reconnected at a Creative Capital retreat in Williamstown, MA, on the campus of Williams College, where Chris was a returning Creative Capital alum and mentor to the new awardees. I was there as a consultant. Our relationship cemented after I saw Apocalypse Management-a visionary animation about overdevelopment and collapse-in an exhibition These Days: Elegies for Modern Times at MASS MoCA curated by Denise Markonish (who later curated a major media-based exhibition The Coast of Industry at that institution in 2024) on view during the time of the retreat. That encounter rekindled our rapport, which was deepened by meeting Ruby Lerner and spending extended time with Alice Gray Stites, two of Chris's beloved friends and champions of his work. It also led to his first solo exhibition at the gallery in 2010. That exhibition marked the beginning of a relationship-professional and personal-that spanned over fifteen years.
Photo: Apocalypse Management (telling about being one being living), (video still), 2009
At Creative Capital retreats thereafter, I witnessed Chris deliver astute and inspiring lectures on his work and mentor the next generation of recipients. Perhaps more importantly, I had the opportunity to spend quality time with him and our colleagues and friends who gathered and gossiped during those special "art summer camps." I have vivid memories of congregating at a bowling alley while at the retreat held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with Chris, Alice Gray Stites, Titus Kaphar, Ruby Lerner, and Andy and Deborah Rappaport, enjoying beer and bonding. I am grateful for those moments that fell outside of day-to-day business interactions and focused on friendship and meaningful connection.
Photo: Chris Doyle with Andy and Deborah Rappaport, Creative Capital Retreat at Rensselaer Poly Tech, Troy, NY, 2015
Since that early retreat in 2010, the gallery has exhibited Chris's work nearly every other year in solo presentations. His practice, rooted in the formal concerns of drawing (a nod to his background in architecture) and infused with wit, empathy, and experimentation, ranged from watercolor to video animation, sculpture to immersive installation. Chris had a gift for finding unexpected connections between the natural and built worlds, often revealing the human costs and incongruities of progress and expansion. He ironically used technology to critique its ubiquity and mourn the loss of the handmade, of paper, of books.
Photo: Installation view: Chris Doyle, You Should Lie Down and Remember the Forest, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 2024
His final exhibition at the gallery, You Should Lie Down Now and Remember the Forest (2024), was among his most poignant. Eerily prescient, the exhibit drew its title from a poem by Susan Stewart and reflected on lives lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. The work centered on a series of exquisite, monochromatically rendered, large-scale watercolors depicting uprooted trees in the forests near Chris's home in Maine-trees felled by storms and high winds. Each watercolor of tree roots served as a memorial to a friend or mentor lost during the pandemic.
Yet, even amid depictions of grief, there was hope: Chris painted signs of new life emerging from the roots, capturing the possibility of regeneration and the enduring power of legacy. As Chris wrote, "I found myself marveling at the new growth springing from these fallen trees. Each drawing, by extension, is both a memorial to a fallen elder and a tribute to the continued impact that their lives will inspire." His art, in this way, mirrored his life-rooted in care, reflection, possibility, and a belief in the capacity of art to endure and grow from loss.
Top Photo: BOXBLUR event during Chris Doyle, You Should Lie Down and Remember the Forest, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 2024
Bottom Photo: Alice Gray Stites, Chris Doyle, Catharine Clark, Catharine Clark Gallery, 2017
Responding to the watercolors and their meaning, composer Shinji Eshima curated an evening of music Remember the Forest, a BOXBLUR commissioned event performed live in the gallery in February 2024. The program reflected the visual art's themes of memory, impermanence, and renewal. Logs (1966) by Paul Chihara called for numerous stand-up basses to be placed throughout the gallery mimicking trees-a forest of instruments-and collectively performing a score that evoked woodland sounds. Eshima also included his own haunting composition August 6th (1995), originally commissioned to commemorate the lives lost in the bombing of Hiroshima on the 50th anniversary of that tragic event. Alongside these string-based compositions, monks from the San Francisco Zen Center chanted to relieve our suffering. The performance became an elegy in motion-layering sound, breath, and silence in response to the visual language Chris had carefully crafted. The program was a powerful testament to how Chris's work invited other artists and practices into his world, creating space for expanded meaning through poetry and music.
Chris's collaboration with composer Jeremy Turner was another hallmark of his interdisciplinary vision. Together, they created five works, including Swell (2017), a 4K digital animation that imagined a hyper-urban city teetering on the edge of collapse. The work was the centerpiece of our 2017 exhibition Hollow and Swell, also generating a BOXBLUR-hosted performance. In that project, Turner's score, composed to accompany the video animation, was performed live by the EOS Ensemble, amplifying the tension and lyricism of Chris's imagery. The visuals in Swell often included glimpses of the artist's hand, drawing on screen-a reminder that culture is built not just through industry, but also through personal gesture and imagination.
Photo: BOXBLUR at Catharine Clark Gallery, 2017, EOS Ensemble performing the Jeremy Turner score for Chris Doyle's video Swell (video still), 2017
No stranger to working with performers, Chris collaborated with choreographer Oliver Halkowich to create a piece for two dancers from Houston Ballet for Texas Contemporary (2016). At that art fair, we also presented a solo booth of Chris's work, expanding upon themes in the performance. The dancers, immersed in Chris's animated projections, embodied his interest in the intersection of movement, media, and the metaphors embedded in physical space. It was an unforgettable presentation-an immersive dialogue between moving image and human motion-further explored in the two-dimensional and video works displayed in the booth, whose walls Chris customized with a mural drafted to unite the presentations.
Photo: Oliver Halkowich and Houston Ballet Dancers, Texas Contemporary, Houston, TX, 2016
Photo: Chris Doyle, video projection to accompany Oliver Halkowich's choreography for two dancers, Texas Contemporary, Houston, TX, 2016
Art fairs brought Chris, Anton Stuebner, and others on my gallery team closer together. While I saw Chris throughout the years at studio visits in New York and at nearly all of the opening receptions we held for his exhibitions in San Francisco-except for the one that took place during the pandemic-it was really during extended time together at art fairs that our friendship developed. We got to know each other through the long fair hours in Houston, New York, Miami, and beyond. Our presentation during Art Basel Miami week of Chris's work in conversation with that of Nina Katchadourian was particularly meaningful for all of us. In 2015, in Miami Beach and through Miami Project, Chris was commissioned to create work for the launch of an XC90 Volvo through the efforts of Max Fishko. At an event presented by Bon Appétit magazine and Volvo, Chris showcased a projection-driven artwork where guests could interact with the new car model. He immersed attendees in video animations while we ate dinner under the open sky of the warm Miami evening. I recall sitting with his daughter Eva, Alice Stites Gray, Laura Lee Brown, and Steve Wilson-all dear people in Chris's life-awash in stunning, moving images, with Chris beaming, surrounded by friends.
Photo: Catharine Clark, Chris Doyle, Anton Stuebner, Booth Installation, Chris Doyle, solo project, Texas Contemporary, Houston, TX, 2016
Photo: Max Fishko, Alice Gray Stites, Chris Doyle, Eva Doyle, Catharine Clark, Bon Appetit/Volvo/Miami Project
Two other presentations of his work at fairs stand out for me. Notably, at the Art on Paper fair in 2016, we debuted Circular Lament-an homage to his late father. Created by animating watercolors and inspired by the art and architecture he witnessed on a trip to Iran with his partner Tim, the piece was a meditation on memory, legacy, and the visual language of mourning. The second was in Istanbul in 2014, where we presented the video animation Waste Generation at the Moving Image fair. It was awarded the Borusan Prize and acquired by the Borusan Collection, which at the time was under the artistic direction of Kathleen Forde, a close friend of Chris's to this day.
Photo: Installation view: Waste Generation, Moving Image Fair, Istanbul, Turkey, 2014
Other monumental public presentations of Chris's video work included Bright Canyon, an animation presented on 90 screens mounted on buildings in Times Square for Midnight Moment and produced by Times Square Arts. On view for three minutes from 11:57 to midnight each evening, Chris's animations momentarily transformed the advertising screens on the high-rise buildings into a natural setting replete with waterfalls, squirrels, canyons, and (some controversial) frolicking ducks. Chris often spoke of his love for Disney's Fantasia and the impact that film's imagery had on his visual psyche. Bright Canyon, a meditation on subsuming man-made structures into a landscape of the natural world, was subsequently presented at the gallery in 2014.
Photo: Bright Canyon (video still),2014
While I am proud of the many exhibits Chris created for the gallery, one of the most transportive experiences I had of his work outside of my own space was at Wave Hill in 2015. They commissioned The Lightening (2015) for the organization's 50th anniversary. Installed in the Aquatic Garden, the artwork comprised three sculptures that served as portals into animated worlds representing realms above, at, and below the water's surface. At dusk, the dark reflecting pool became a luminous screen. As the sun set over the Hudson River and the Palisades cliffs surrounding the Bronx campus, the colors of Chris's animations grew more vivid, more saturated, as if rising into view from another dimension. The sculptures, darkened in daylight, came alive under the night sky. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus performed Jeremy Turner's score live, and in that fleeting twilight-between day and night, presence and memory-the experience was sublime, heightened by the presence of Chris's expansive community. I was transported by the angelic children's voices and the friendships that surrounded me. Tears welled in my eyes as I stood with Kelly Freeman, my sister Emilie, Paul Socolow, Nora Ligorano, Marshall Reese, and many others who had come to experience the evening and celebrate Chris's creativity. We felt elevated by the experience. As the physical landscape disappeared into shadow, the artwork emerged in full clarity, shimmering with depth and feeling, allowing us to experience a kind of intimacy and human connectedness, too often rare in the art world. It was one of the most spiritually affirming moments of my art life.
Photos: Installation views: Chris Doyle, The Lightening, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY, 2014
It bears mentioning that Chris also collaborated with nature itself for an exhibition at my gallery in 2014, later presented at Wave Hill. His spirit of experimentation was strongly evident in The Fluid, which consisted of watercolors created with water drawn from the Hudson River. One series depicted abstractions made by freezing ice infused with watercolor and then allowing the ice to create the drawing-the water, in effect, made the compositions. The other series featured meticulously rendered representational images of frozen waterfalls in upstate New York. The work exemplified Chris's ongoing dialogue with natural materials and processes: chance procedures as counterpoint to controlled craft.
Photo: Paul Socolow, Kelly Feeman, Catharine Clark at Chris Doyle, The Lightening, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY, 2014
Photo: Installation view: Chris Doyle: The Fluid, (artist designed wallpaper and watercolors), Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 2014
Photo: Installation view: Chris Doyle: The Fluid, (three channel video - stills), 2014, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Chris's 2012 solo exhibition Idyllwild at my gallery featured a stunningly diverse body of work that reflected on the rise and fall of civilizations through the lens of environmental degradation, with a particular focus on Chris's media-based works. Inspired by Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire series, the exhibition included animations such as Apocalypse Management (telling about being one being living) (2009), Waste Generation (2010), and Idyllwild (2012), as well as light boxes, large-scale watercolors, and the luminous circular projection Rondo. These works served as meditations on cycles of ruin and renewal, often embedding beauty within warning. We presented the exhibit in concert with the ZERO1 art and technology biennial.
Photo: Waste Generation, (video still), 2010
Recently, Chris and his longtime partner, Tim Houlihan, embarked on a new chapter, leaving Brooklyn to divide their time between Blue Hill, Maine, and Mexico City-two regions that deeply informed Chris's work. Maine offered stillness, reflection, and a slower tempo of observation, resulting in the exhibit You Should Lie Down and Remember the Forest (2024). Mexico inspired density, color, and a dive into surrealism. This influence is vividly evident in Hollow and Swell (2017), where Chris imagined a city that had grown to unprecedented heights at a historical juncture where industrialization had yielded to a technological revolution. Natural environments are obstructed by buildings and structures throughout the animation, serving as a salient metaphor for our attempts to control nature through modes of expansion that undermine our most basic needs for survival. The piece powerfully captures the tension between industrialization and the handmade; human ambition and environmental fragility-themes rooted in Chris's experience in the vibrant, complex urban landscapes of Mexico City, and revisited in the body of work titled The Parables of Correction, presented at the gallery during the pandemic in 2020.
Photo: Swell, (video still), 2017, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Photo: The Parables of Correction (video still), 2020, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Chris was trained in architecture at Harvard, and that discipline shaped his approach to line, drawing, systems, and scale. But what defined his work most was its expansiveness, its grounding in art history, its rich generosity, its intelligence. He created space-conceptually, visually, emotionally, physically-for others to enter, reflect, and respond. His work acknowledged grief, absurdity, loss, change, and complexity without abandoning the possibilities for hope, beauty, and renewal.
He received many accolades throughout his career-Creative Capital, NYFA, the MAP Fund, a Guggenheim Fellowship, major public commissions, and museum exhibitions-but what I most cherished about his work is how it fostered my knowing him for more than fifteen years. His persona was sharp, generous, witty, curious, collaborative, and kind. One example of his spirit that stands out for me is that he founded the Reach Projects Residency in Blue Hill, where artists could make work inspired and supported by the program. For example, Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis were invited to create work there, inspired by the Maine coast and traditional practices of net-making. What Chris facilitated allowed them to make monumental works that were shown at the gallery in 2022. Chris built deep collaborations across disciplines and left everyone he worked with feeling seen and inspired. His networks and circles of friends are vast and mourn his absence.
Representing Chris's career is a great honor, one that has helped define my professional life. His death, so unexpected, leaves me and my team at the gallery grieving, yet grateful for the opportunities we had to work together. Chris leaves the world with work that rewards us for looking closely, for paying attention, and inspires us to imagine wildly-it's an artistic legacy that has found resonance with private collectors and museum curators alike, and placement in public settings and institutional collections.
Chris is survived by his daughter Eva, his partner Tim, and the communities of people whose lives he touched-from Maine to Mexico, from Istanbul to New York. We miss you, dear Chris, and feel so fortunate to have been immersed in your work, world, and friendship through the many years we worked together. They say that the memory of someone is a blessing. In Chris's case, we are blessed not only with the memories but also with an artistic legacy that will continue to inspire future generations and provide a touchstone for those who knew him and the beloved artist he was. Ars longa.
Photo: Catharine Clark and Chris Doyle, Creative Capital retreat at Rensselaer Polytechnic, Troy, NY, 2015
- Catharine Clark, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA, August 2025
Chris Dole, Refracture, (watercolor), 2012
