Nadine Christensen and Anne Wallace:
Recent Paintings

Nadine Christensen and Anne Wallace are inspired by accidental, uncanny and everyday incidents and images. This bricolage of material is sourced variously through daily observation, literature, memory and photography and transformed into memorable and compelling images. Landscape, inanimate structures and objects, and the traces of human presence permeate each of the artists’ works. Although these works tinker on the edge of narrative, they possess a quiet solitude that stops short of telling a story. The pulse of life has been made still and motionless, as if to preserve it for our memory.

While each artist has a different approach, they share an interest in the art of composition. In Christensen’s work, various structures twist and turn in orientation. A detailed area of painting is balanced by open fields of colour. In Wallace’s paintings, the viewer’s eye moves from the broad, colourful horizontal and vertical planes of an architectural façade to dense foliage. Black windows beckon our gaze to interiors that are not visible. In the work of each artist, we are very aware of time, whether it is the time of day, or an era gone by. The paintings feel specific rather than universal in this sense. They are not representing something iconic, but rather a transitional moment.

Christensen and Wallace are two very different artists. Yet they share an interest in the open and closed forms of inanimate objects—the ways in which we can be drawn in and through an image, window, shape or structure. In addition, landscape features both as a site upon which human activity has inscribed its presence, but also as an ever-present force. In these works, the landscape is both remote and familiar. Each artist is acutely aware of the role of time and its relationship to place. These ‘stilled lives’ ask us to pause and consider the significance of everyday experiences.