Aotearoa Art Fair 2022

In May 2018, Christina Pataialii painted west, a large scale temporary wall mural at the Aotearoa Art Fair. At the time she was one of the country’s most exciting recent graduates, and was making waves throughout the art scene.

Since then, Christina has gone from strength to strength - in four short years she has opened a solo exhibition at Te Tuhi, travelled to London for the Gasworks Residency, been awarded the inaugural Rydal Prize, exhibited at the City Gallery Wellington, completed a monumental installation at Tauranga Art Gallery and been curated into triennials at QAGOMA in Brisbane and the New Museum in New York.

Now, in 2022, Christina returns to the Aotearoa Art Fair with a solo exhibition of new paintings. Her bold, expressive paintings are alive with movement, colour and a sense of immediacy. Celebrated for her distinctive approach that mixes high and low materials and her eye for colour, her work exudes a dynamic energy that feels entirely fresh.

Working directly onto drop sheet canvas – a material that allows her to work on a large scale – Christina enjoys breaking with convention and experimenting with her medium. The seam of the drop cloth becomes a compositional tool; the weave of the fabric creates texture against which paint is manipulated; the flatness of the house paint plays with perceptions of space, depth and distance.

Christina has a personal relationship with drop cloth and house paint. The daughter of a house painter, she grew up in a Samoan/Pakeha family in West Auckland, often tagging along on jobs with her father. The memory of observing him work, and the physicality of house painting, is something that echoes through her practice.

Drawing on personal and collective history, Christina’s paintings operate in a liminal space between abstraction and representation. Deliberately ambiguous, they are painted from memory and imagination, untethered from a specific time or place.

This new body of work is loaded with images and gestures familiar to Christina’s practice: picket fences; moons; scrubby, energetic clouds; rugby posts; and open, large, gestural brushwork. Yet there are subtle shifts, which indicate important developments.

Following on from recent experimentations, Christina introduces a stronger, crisper sense of line, geometry and three-dimensional space. There is a distinct sense of interior space with some works clearly located inside a suburban, domestic setting. Archways and staircases – symbols of transition and liminality – are rendered in a gritty palette, lending the works an urban, industrial sense of environment. Moody, artificial-seeming lighting, as if coming from fluorescent bulbs or street lights, filters through the works – notably streaming through the archways in The Pinch (cover image).

Christina Pataialii (b. 1988) lives and works in Wellington. She has been exhibiting with McLeavey Gallery since 2019.