2024: Nadine Christensen

Gertrude is pleased to announce the release of the 2024 Gertrude Edition 40 Knots by Nadine Christensen.

Building upon Nadine Christensen’s enduring interest in everyday functional objects, 40 Knots is a variable edition of hand-painted 3D-printed resin brooms whose handles have been contorted into a rough knot. Created using a real broom, the artist twisted and tangled its aluminium handle then scanned, scaled down and printed the resulting form in resin. Acts of crushing, denting and compressing recur and are often tensely rendered in Christensen’s work. In this work, these actions offer each Knot a slightly awkward sense of tumbling agency and individual character.   

Known predominantly as a painter, Christensen’s work pulls at the interplay between object and surface and in shifting from three dimensions to two and back again, 40 Knots appears to be extruded from one of her flat, acrylic paintings. Airbrushed in matte automotive (and other) paints, the sculptures’ vibrance points to the class of object we expect the broom to be in – those mass-produced, easily discarded, yet functional objects that litter our daily lives. Simultaneously, the Knots resist this reading. The broom’s scale is slightly off – it is not a miniature, but is not full sized, either. The plasticky, near-fluorescent colours are softened by shades of butter yellow, pale peach and lilac, and on close inspection, the care with which these objects have been individually painted subverts the expectation of mechanical reproduction. 

Established in 2002 to raise funds in support of Gertrude's program and to promote the connection between current and past studio artists, the Gertrude Editions are an annual series of specially commissioned limited-edition works of art.

Nadine Christensen completed degrees in Painting at Monash University (1993) and the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (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. In 2023, Christensen presented Around, an exhibition surveying 25 years of her practice at Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne. Other recent exhibitions include Painting, More Painting, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2016); Parallel Lives: Australian Painting Today, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria and Silenzi, Prigioni de Palazzo Ducale, Venice (both 2006); This and other worlds, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005); New04, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2004); and This was the future… , Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2003).

Christensen was a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary (1998–99) and a founding member of Clubs Projects inc. She has regularly curated exhibitions and events, coordinated publishing projects, and has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including an Australia Council Los Angeles studio residency (2003), the Fletcher Jones Art Prize (2008) and the R&M McGivern Prize for Painting (2019). Christensen is a lecturer in Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.