The University of Melbourne has announced a major exhibition by Melbourne-based artist Nadine Christensen, representing her first career survey to date. The exhibition, titled ‘Around’, brings together key works with a number of ambitious new commissions including interventions to the museum’s architecture. Presented at Buxton Contemporary, the exhibition will run from 24 November 2023 to 7 April 2024. Curated by Samantha Comte, Senior Curator, Art Museums at the University of Melbourne, the exhibition explores the enduring nature of painting as well as its complex legacy, which has been at the core of Nadine Christensen’s practice for more than twenty years.

Christensen has long engaged with notions of the every day, explored through the conventions of still life tradition and through her compositing of found objects. In gleaning what is seemingly incidental and overlooked from her immediate environment; studio, home, neighborhood, op shops, and the like, Christensen reflects on the fragility and precarity of life as well as human resourcefulness and adaptability, which she recognizes as often being found at the fringes or periphery.
‘Around’ will feature over 70 paintings ranging from 1998–2023, including a new series of ambitiously scaled paintings, and rarely seen works from private lenders. Christensen will also present several major sculptural works, including large-scale audience-activated kinetic works.