Christopher Flach is a fine art painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and photographer, born and raised in New York City. He works today just blocks from where he grew up.
Flach's first medium was the camera. He studied with Ansel Adams and the portraitist Yousuf Karsh, and later with the documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark, with photographic internships at the Guggenheim Museum and the International Center of Photography. His photographs of 1970s Manhattan street life, Upper East Side doormen, and Holy Week processions in Mexico City have appeared in The New York Times and shelter and design magazines including House Beautiful, Elle Decor, and Traditional Home.
He holds a BFA from Marietta College and a doctorate in psychology from the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco, a training that still shows in the candor of his portraits. In San Francisco he co-founded the interior design firm Martha Angus Inc. before returning home to New York.
Since 2010 his paintings and sculpture have been shown with Gerald Bland Inc. in New York: large-scale acrylic portraits and florals, among them Charles (2023), Iris (2019), and the Small Portraits series (2012–2022), alongside glazed ceramic figures and bronzes, including his ceramic bust of Basquiat. His subjects run from contemporary sitters to cultural icons and historical figures, and his work has hung in gallery and museum shows beside artists such as Ed Ruscha, Kiki Smith, John Baldessari, and Pat Steir.
As a filmmaker, his documentary Madeleine Castaing, a portrait of the legendary French decorator, premiered in New York in 2008 and screened at festival venues; his films on the crochet artist OLEK, photographer Ulvis Alberts, and the artists of Cēsis, Latvia are on his YouTube channel. In August 2014 he installed nine large-scale portraits of Latvian writers and artists on the walls of the historic Cēsis Castle in Latvia.
