Nadine Christensen: Around

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. This exhibition reveals Christensen’s long engagement with the everyday, celebrating the inextricable tangle of art and life.

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 it’s 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 artist’s first monograph will be published to coincide with this exhibition offering new insights into Christensen’s creative life and evolution through texts by Rosemary Forde, Jennifer Higgie and a poem by Masato Takasaka and Errol John Kidd.

Curated by Samantha Comte, Senior Curator, Art Museums, the University of Melbourne.