In Public Image Christina Zimpel’s latest series of paintings, the New York based Australian artist continues her interest in exploring the public vs. private personas of women. This series is particularly inspired by her youth in Perth, on the cusp of change. Music, art school, poseurs, pubs and punks on the beach all meld together in an unlikely crowd.
Christina Zimpel practice centres around the idea of performance and how ordinary people deal with that. Her paintings and drawings suggest women not quite of this time and not quite perfect, a feeling she sometimes has herself with the rapid changes in society and social media.
Christina’s often intense, non-realistic use of colour and simplified reductive shapes with a split horizon creates a blatant feeling that there is nowhere to hide and that her subjects are fully exposed. The colours are subversive rather than soft and feminine, being drawn from her childhood memories of the sixties and seventies, glam and punk rock and a love of the Fauves.
Clothing is carefully edited to suggest a theatrical impression – a feeling of costume with a touch of the naughty. An obsession with luscious hair twisted into a knot recalls the eccentric muses of Toulouse-Lautrec, the highly elaborate ancient Greek and Roman coiffures and 50’s pin up girls. The organic nature of hair allows expressive and free brushstrokes set amongst an otherwise strict composition.
