Around is the first major survey of Melbourne-based artist Nadine Christensen, bringing together over 70 works spanning two decades of her practice, alongside ambitious new commissions. The exhibition reveals Christensen’s long engagement with the everyday, celebrating the inextricable tangle of art and life. Around is presented at Buxton Contemporary, curated by Samantha Comte, Senior Curator, Art Museums, the University of Melbourne.
At the core of Christensen’s work is a deep commitment to painting, and a consideration of its complex legacy and enduring nature. Constantly re-evaluating the medium and pushing its spatial and perceptual limits, she experiments with the physicality of paint and the endless ways it can be applied. Christensen’s paintings chart a perpetual motion through art and life as she negotiates her immediate environment – studio, home, neighbourhood, work and back again, gathering objects and ideas. A cyclical energy runs through Christensen’s practice – one work leads to another as she looks back to an element in an earlier painting, then re-applies, recontextualises or re-examines it from a new angle to reveal other possibilities. For Christensen, this circularity is not smooth but subject to disruptions both accidental and intentional. The work demands a capacity for both pleasure and discomfort – mirroring life itself as an accumulation of experiences, that change how one sees and feels.
The following works are available for acquisition.
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AVAILABLE WORKS
CLICK ON IMAGE FOR VIEW ON WALL FACILITY & FURTHER DETAILS -
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INSTALLATION IMAGES
Photography: Christian Capurro -
VIDEO WORKS
$4,200 eachNadine Christensen, Slow Motion, 2023
Single Channel HD digital video; colour, silent; 1 min 59 secs, Cinematographer Ella Sowinska, Edition of 3 + A.P -
Nadine Christensen, doing nothing doing (Around), 2022
HD digital video; colour, 4 mins: 08 secs, Cinematographer Ella Sowinska, Edition of 3 + A.P -
BIO
Nadine Christensen’s practice encompasses painting, installation and drawing and has comprised an ongoing investigation into natural phenomena. She draws on diverse sources including design and illustration, architecture, new and arcane technologies, science fiction, animation, tall stories and curiosities to engage the changing possibilities and conditions of light and perception. Christensen’s work also explores the desire to map and understand our environment as well as the role of narrative and story telling in the unfolding of information throughout contemporary culture. Recent work samples from small moments in her larger paintings and utilises aspects of external surfaces and everyday objects such as piles of dirt, tables, ropes and chains that occupy the juncture between the real and the imagined. Montage style paintings combine Christensen’s highly recognisable gradational and flat colouring, 3D rendering and trompe l’oeil effects while the imagery itself veers from representational and identifiable elements toward pure abstraction.
NADINE CHRISTENSEN completed degrees in Painting at Monash University (1993) and the Victorian College of the Arts (1997). She has held solo exhibitions at galleries in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra and has participated in group and collaborative exhibitions across Australia and internationally including Tokyo, Los Angeles, Tijuana, Paris and Venice. Her work was recently included in Painting, More Painting, at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA); Parallel Lives, Australian Painting Today, at Tarra Warra Museum of Art and in Silenzi at the Prigioni de Palazzo Ducale in Venice. In 2005 her work was featured in This and other worlds at the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2004 she was invited into New04 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art as well as This was the future... a survey of three decades of sculpture at Heide Museum of Modern Art. Christensen was a resident at Gertrude Contemporary (1998-99) and a founding member of Clubs Projects inc. She has regularly curated exhibitions, events and coordinated publishing projects, and has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Australia Council Los Angeles studio residency (2003), The Fletcher Jones Art Prize (2008) and The RJ McGivern Acquisitve Prize (2019). Her work is held in major public and private collections throughout Australia.
