Courtesy: the artist and Olsen Gallery, Sydney.

Olsen Gallery presents work by Christina Zimpel at OLSEN ANNEXE.

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.

Zimpel’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.

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