Zaki Christ (b. 1987 Los Angeles, California) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his BFA from Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is the recipient of multiple grants in the Arts. Christ has exhibited in numerous group shows in Los Angeles including: la BEAST gallery, H Kazan Gallery, Fisher Gallery, The Brewery, and The Fold. Christ has erected various large scale murals in his home town of Los Angeles. Christ’s work is in numerous private collections.

Amidst his multidisciplinary practice, furniture making is something that Zaki Christ fell into. Enamored with industrial debris, the artist is a self-described scavenger, collecting odd materials throughout his journey and living with them —sometimes for years— before figuring out a use for them. The idea for his sculptural furniture piece “U-HAUL Heavy Duty Bench” originated from an empty tissue box that the artist filled with excess concrete, he became so fond of the form it produced that he painted it teal and spent the next 4 years looking at it every day. The process to create “U-HAUL Heavy Duty Bench” is not much different from the tissue box it’s based on, Christ fills cardboard boxes with concrete and allows the liquid stone to echo the form and texture of the mundane material it inhabits.The title pays homage to what Christ describes as the work’s sophomoric yet functional nature, its somewhat silly method of rendering the ordinary into something beautiful. The pilgrimage behind his sculpture “San Pedro” involved Christ dragging a cement encased wooden post up a rocky cliff, followed a year later by a cubular block of concrete complete with protruding rebar. Literally elevating the former with the latter in a minimalistic assemblage, Christ again seeks to transform standard definitions of beauty and functionality, allowing these ocean-weathered, castaway materials to gain power in a gallery setting.