Artsy
“5 Artists on Our Radar in April 2026”
Maxwell Rabb
Apr 8, 2026
Christian Franzen
B. 1994, Long Beach, California. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Golden vistas of Southern California gleam from the canvases of Los Angeles artist Christian Franzen. The 32-year-old painter sources his scenes from a massive archive of his own photographs, which form studies of how light reflects off the Pacific Ocean. A series of these paintings appears in his debut New York solo show at Uffner & Liu, titled SHIFTY and on view through May 9th.
Franzen’s paintings are a love letter to the Californian horizon, much like those of his fellow Angelino, Sayre Gomez. The artist layers, glazes, and airbrushes acrylic on linen to capture the gradients of the sunlight against the skyline. Things That Aren’t Here Anymore (2025), for instance, features subtle oranges as the sun clashes with a cloudy dusk sky. In other artworks, Franzen depicts uncanny encounters with animals. In Black Cat (2024), a phantom cat with piercing white eyes barely registers against a nighttime backdrop. These paintings, though vastly different in subject matter, are connected by the artist’s attention to gesture and light as he manipulates paint to create strange and mesmerizing shadows.
Franzen earned his BFA from California State University, Long Beach, in 2018. He has presented solo shows with London’s Glasshouse and Los Angeles–based galleries in lieu and OWO.
