Cordata Gallery is pleased to announce ‘Charles Villiers: Untethered’, the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.
Charles Villiers belongs to a generation of artists whose careers developed outside rigid institutional frameworks, shaped instead by personal exploration, experimentation, and sustained studio practice. Active for several decades, Villiers has produced a body of work that spans painting, sculpture, drawing, mixed media, photography, digital image-based works, and even music, reflecting a lifelong commitment to visual inquiry and creative independence.
At the center of Villiers’ practice lies an ongoing investigation into his childhood memories and what he describes as non-objective painting. Rather than depicting recognizable subjects, his works explore states of mind and movement of thought: moments of contemplation, the sensation of being lost in thought, impulses of craving, shifts in energy, and the often tangled process through which ideas take form. Lines, layered shapes, and fields of color suggest motion, transformation, and turning points. Forms appear to emerge, dissolve, and recombine, creating compositions that feel spontaneous yet deeply intuitive. In this sense, Villiers’ paintings can be understood less as representations of the external world and more as visualizations of inner processes—thinking, searching, and becoming.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog. More details to be announced soon.
About the artist
Charles Villiers (b. 1951, New Jersey. Lives and works in Bellingham, WA)
Charles Villiers is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, fashion photography, music, and video. Active since 1970 he has exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe, sustaining a career of more than five decades across institutional, commercial, and independent venues, and even the music industry.
Born in 1951 in New Jersey to Nita Brown and inventor Amherst Villiers, Charles Villiers received early classical artistic training from his father. He was also mentored by Sir Roland Penrose, the Surrealist artist and co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. who left a strong impression on him. Charles did not attend any art school but trained himself looking at many noted artists. By the early 1970s, his work was presented internationally, including installations and exhibitions in Copenhagen, Majorca, London, Paris, and eventually at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London. In 1976, he participated in the inaugural American Painters in Paris exhibition in France.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Villiers developed a significant presence in Los Angeles, exhibiting at Gallery West, Metro Gallery, Kirk De Gooyer Gallery, Lawrence Silver Gallery, Natoli-Ross Gallery, Diane Nelson Gallery, Future Perfect, and Shinno Gallery. His work was also included in major group exhibitions and institutional projects, including Car and Culture at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1984), Tubular Art at the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, and Best of the 1980s at the Laguna Museum of Art. He continued to exhibit internationally in London, Portland, Santa Barbara, and Tokyo, and expanded his practice to digital and installation formats in the 2000s, including the Virtual Air Gallery (2001) and Downey Museum of Art (Control Drama, 2006; group exhibition, 2007). In 2011, The Secret Organics, curated by Alfred Munkenbeck, was presented in London.
Villiers’ commissioned work spans public, corporate, and private projects. Notable commissions include The Thirty-Foot Spinning Triptych for MOCA in conjunction with the Mark Taper Forum (1984), sculptural and architectural projects for Scratch Restaurant, Venice (1986), a bronze commission for The Carriage House, New York (1987), Cast from Eden bronzes (1986), The Light House painting for the Mondrian Hotel, Los Angeles (1991), Faith, fourteen large-scale sculptures in Montecito, California (1997), and Nude Woman with Crown & Goat for Spago, Hollywood (1997). Later projects include The Black Totem (2000), Unit 29 Video Projects (2003), a CD cover and booklet design for Stephen Bishop’s Saudade (2007), and a project for the Museum of Contemporary Art & Culture / New Museum in Downey (2007).
