Carter Flachbarth’s artworks are becoming instantly recognizable. His compositions, suspended between humor and unease, often feature elongated hands, distorted perspectives, and emotionally distant figures, all aimed to mirror the overstimulated rhythms of contemporary life. Informed by the digital age and working from a deep archive of screenshots, personal memories, comic books, and references to art history, the painter creates psychologically charged scenes that hover between cinematic fiction and lived experience, merging the visual language of film stills, internet culture, and classical portraiture.
Based in Atlanta, Carter Flacbarth has developed a visual language shaped equally by mass culture and an enduring reverence for painters of the past. His latest exhibition, “Tales From the Freezer,” presented at Martha’s in Austin, continued his exploration of authenticity, appropriation, and emotional suspension through a new body of 10 smaller-scale works inspired by cinema and memory. Referencing filmmaker Roy Andersson’s idea that painting has the unique ability to “freeze” emotion in time, the exhibition transformed cinematic fragments into quietly uncanny tableaux, where personal symbols and borrowed narratives collapse into something entirely his own.
Painting Between Memory and Cinema
“The Things That Fly and Float,” 2026, Carter Flachbarth, “Tales From the Freezer” at Martha’s Gallery, courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
“The Harvest,” 2026, Carter Flachbarth, “Tales From the Freezer” at Martha’s Gallery, courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
WHITEWALL: Your paintings blur the line between cinematic storytelling and personal memory. Where did your signature style come from?
CARTER FLACHBARTH: I think a signature style is something that’s constantly being discovered and iterated on. I think most artists have an innate quality in the way they naturally create things, and sometimes it takes years to uncover and get to the root of the ways of creating that feel singular to you. When I first discovered painting, I was trying to teach myself through Master copies. Ten years later, I feel like I am just now finding my way back to the things I was learning and initially drawn to back then.
“There is a natural inclination toward a despondent view of the world,”
-Carter Flachbarth.
WW: Many of your figures feel psychologically charged—caught in moments of boredom, anxiety, distraction, or reflection. What draws you to those emotional states? What do you hope to highlight about them? How do they mirror contemporary life?
CF: At any point in human history, there is a natural inclination toward a despondent view of the world. Every generation seems to think the world is in dire need of either saving or ending. It feels like we constantly live in the moment before the punchline of a joke where it will either land or miss entirely. Where we fix everything or finally ruin it for good. It’s that tension just before the punchline that makes a joke so funny or so bad. I am drawn to that emotionally because painting, both as a craft and a career, feels very similarly uncertain, so I like to think that my paintings exist in that setting too. Before things are saved or ended. Before we laugh or cringe. Before a painting succeeds or fails. I try to make the world my figures inhabit feel capable of hope, destitution, and humor all at the same time.
Carter Flachbarth on Painting as Labor
Installation view of “Tales From the Freezer” at Martha’s Gallery, photo by Andrea Calo.
WW: Scale and perspective play a huge role in your compositions, especially in the exaggerated rendering of hands and limbs. What interests you about manipulating the body in this way? What does it allow you to communicate emotionally?
CF: From the onset, I never truly believed in the myth of the genius artist. For me, an artist was always a more pragmatic archetype. Someone who is both a skilled worker and a studied craftsman. Having family close in the trades, I viewed artists, and myself, as tradespeople. Throughout history, many artists have included things within their work that highlighted their craftsmanship and their abilities. Van Eyck’s self portrait in the mirror of the Arnolfini Portrait being perhaps the most famous example. Albrecht Durer expressed this in his self portrait, by placing his hand (the most notoriously difficult body part to paint and the symbol of craft) below his face to symbolize that his hand and his craft were just as important to his identity as his face or his visage. This has always resonated with me and was originally the impetus for creating a hierarchical structure between the hands and faces in my work. By highlighting the hands of the figures, I am, in essence, highlighting my identity as a craftsperson and a skilled laborer as well as highlighting the fact that the painting is an object of labor. All the work, in essence, becomes self-portraits of my life’s work. As AI looms closer, this demarcation of physical human labor feels ever more imperative to what I’m doing.
The Emotional Weight of Contemporary Life
“The Predawn Dark” 2026, Carter Flachbarth, “Tales From the Freezer” at Martha’s Gallery, courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
“The Hole in the Heavens” 2026, Carter Flachbarth, “Tales From the Freezer” at Martha’s Gallery, courtesy of the gallery and the artist.
WW: Your past works have explored ideas of authenticity and image-making in the digital era, such as some seen in your past exhibition “Thrown in Time.” How has your relationship to painting evolved as screens and mediated imagery increasingly shape how we experience the world?
CF: It is one of the things that I think about the most when it comes to painting. Creating images in a time with access to an infinite number of images makes you reanalyze and reconsider the role of painting among everything else. Painting almost by necessity must take on a more personal role. Painting as a display of a novel idea has seemed to have reached the limit of its diminishing returns.
The purpose of any artistic medium is to create friction between the artist and the work. It is within that friction where the excitement and mystery of creating art lie. For the past 20 years, digital tools and imagery have felt novel and new to this dynamic, but they have increasingly eroded the friction of creating images. I am looking for ways to increase the friction between myself and the work in the studio. Where the future of digital tools seems to hope to offer us anything at any time, I’m trying to engage with restriction and friction as much as possible in my images, whether that be drawing from life or trying to use only what’s around me to create new images that still feel contemporary. The friction is the innately human element that bestows the work with its meaning. I believe that when the artist, their identity, their sensibilities, and the friction of the medium mix in a perfect way, that is when a work becomes eternal.
“I’m trying to engage with restriction and friction as much as possible in my images,”
-Carter Flachbarth.
WW: What ideas, themes, or experiments are you currently exploring? What can audiences expect from the next chapter of your practice?
CF: I’ve recently gotten together with film and photography friends who have helped me acquire some film and photo equipment for the studio. I want to see what I can do with this filmic language that I have been studying for almost a decade now. I find it really interesting to see what would happen if I start to treat the normal vignettes of my own life with the mediated, exaggerated eye that I have trained, and what could happen if I splice these images with the found media that I’m used to working with.
Installation view of “Tales From the Freezer” at Martha’s Gallery, photo by Andrea Calo.
