Nadine Christensen's practice contends with the granular materiality of the studio and its intersection with the everyday; a generative space that embraces the discordant, and demands a capacity for both pleasure and discomfort.
Painting is both a point of departure and a return for Christensen; a site where the physicality of paint is subject to a process that switches between precision and conscious de-skilling.
Christensen dwells in the underneath of our experience. Complex pictorial groupings painted across conventional and found supports emerge from an encounter with a setting, and combine to render the long echo of art in life and life in art. Described as image sculptures these arrangements incorporate the overlooked, the mundane and the unexceptional. Their stillness is frequently disrupted in presentation through interventions that offer kinetic release – as well as sometimes surprising, humorous and playful moments.
Every decision is deliberate. The edges are sharp, except when they’re not; the surfaces technically flawless, except when the paint is sponged on or scratched away. Everywhere there are overlaps, holes, objects viewed through gaps. We end up looking through the paintings, trying to gauge their ground. There’s a missing drawer-handle in Wardrobe I can’t stop looking at: a space the size of a pin-prick that somehow has the force of a black hole. Flies are a repeated motif; also objects that fly (kites, flags); also blue painters’ tape, ribbon-like but stuck down, painted so precisely as to require several looks, just to check.
Anna Dunnill, un Magazine, December 2018.