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 storytelling 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.
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 Parallel Lives, Australian Painting Today, at Tarra Warra Museum of Art and in Silenzi at the Prigioni de Palazzo Ducale in Venice.