Jonathan Chapline

Jonathan Chapline was born in 1987 in Savannah, Georgia, and was raised in Waco, Texas. He earned a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010, having taken part in RISD's European Honors Program in Rome in 2009. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Chapline's practice starts on a computer. He builds domestic interiors, still lifes, and constructed rooms in 3D modeling software, then works from those digital compositions to make paintings and sculptures, a method that repeatedly runs through gallery and market descriptions of his work. His first solo exhibition with The Hole, Material Memory, opened in New York in November 2018 and marked the start of a continuing relationship with the gallery, which has since presented his work in Los Angeles and at international art fairs. He has also shown with NANZUKA in Tokyo, including the solo exhibition Metropolis in 2023, and with AISHONANZUKA in Hong Kong in 2021. In December 2020, The Hole partnered with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami on Plein Air, a 3D walkthrough exhibition of new work staged at 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. His work has also been shown at X Museum, Beijing, and Power Long Museum, Shanghai, and reporting from Factum Arte states it has been featured in publications including The New Yorker, New American Paintings, and Kunstforum, a claim drawn from a single source and not independently confirmed here.

Chapline has not yet accumulated the kind of sustained, quotable critical record that would let a named critic's exact words be reproduced with confidence. Coverage instead centers on his working method: rendering interiors and still-life arrangements digitally before rebuilding them by hand in paint and sculpture, a process gallery and market writers repeatedly describe as blurring virtual and physical space. His inclusion in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and X Museum, Beijing, and his fair presentations with The Hole and NANZUKA at venues including Art Basel Hong Kong and Miami, point to growing institutional and gallery-level validation, even where formal critical prizes have not been documented.

Chapline's secondary market runs almost entirely through Hong Kong sales. His all-time auction high is Untitled (2018), an interior scene that sold for HK$1,890,000 (about USD 243,810) at Phillips in association with Poly Auction, Hong Kong, on 3 December 2021, well above its HK$300,000 to 500,000 estimate. Subsequent Phillips sales in Hong Kong, including works in 2024, have settled far below that figure, in the HK$76,000 to 90,000 range, indicating a market that is still thin and sensitive to which specific work comes up for sale. A single Chinese-language market analysis places his total public auction history at roughly 13 results as of its publication; that figure has not been independently corroborated here and should be treated as indicative rather than definitive.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Chapline, and no certificate-of-authenticity program has been identified; the most reliable route to verification runs through his representing galleries, The Hole and NANZUKA, and their exhibition and sale records. Collectors should also note that at least one Phillips-catalogued 2019 painting is signed and dated on the reverse as "Chaplin Chapline," a naming variant worth checking against gallery documentation rather than treating as a separate artist. His auction history is short and concentrated in Hong Kong day and evening sales, with results ranging from roughly HK$76,000 to the HK$1,890,000 record, so any single result should be read in the context of that limited, recent sample rather than as evidence of a long, stable price trend.