Webb is a self-taught visual artist based in Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the most recent recipient of the Arts Nova Scotia Established Artist Recognition Award (2026) and the No Title Gallery Venezia Prize for Painting (2024), and will present a solo exhibition at CREA – Cantieri del Contemporaneo Venezia in 2027.

He has received numerous grants from both the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia. His work has been exhibited in both Canada and Europe, including Contained (Dalhousie University School of Architecture, Halifax, 2024), Dys(U)topia (Venice, Italy, 2024), Dominus Vobiscum (Cathedral Church of All Saints, Halifax, 2022), and Air Land 4.0: Nature, Technology, Energy (Torino, Italy, 2022).

Webb’s work is held in public and institutional collections including the Vatican Museums within the Holy See, the Comune di Valenzano (Bari, Italy), the Nova Scotia Art Bank, Province House (Nova Scotia), and Saint Mary’s University. He has also participated in artist residencies in both Canada and Europe, including ARCAC (Canada) and Quasi Quadro (Italy).

Webb frequently guest lectures at universities and art colleges and is also the co-founder and director of PAVIA Gallery where he curates exhibitions and directs an Artist-in-Residence program involving national and international artists.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Italian-Canadian artist Christopher Webb explores the tension between inheritance and erasure, examining how migration, commerce, and identity are intertwined across generations. His practice is deeply rooted in personal history — navigating the complexities of assimilation, loss of language, and the transformation of culture and identity through necessity and survival.

Through a meticulous and restrained visual language, Webb’s paintings depict everyday scenes and objects — sometimes cropped, often isolated — creating images that feel at once intimate and distant, familiar and unknowable. His works, often inspired by personal events and archival photographs, elevate the overlooked and mundane: shipping containers, fragment of handwritten text, vessels lost in transit. These motifs are layered with prose, memory, and the weight of inherited narratives, transforming them into artifacts of adaptation and longing.

In recent years, Webb’s focus has shifted to the movement of goods as a metaphor. His paintings of cargo ships and containers reflect not only on trade and globalization but on the personal displacement embedded in these systems — the ways in which migration reshapes identity, how cultural memory is commodified, and how the pursuit of a "better life" often comes at the cost of losing something essential.

Webb’s work questions what we carry forward and what we leave behind. It speaks to the invisible weight of names, the stories that are silenced, and the fractured spaces between belonging and estrangement. His paintings thrive on the tension between utility and disposability, history and reinvention, challenging the viewer to reconsider the intersections of migration, economy, and identity — not just in the world at large, but in the deeply personal landscapes of family and self.