Selected Texts & Press
Regarding The Gaze
Catalogue Essay by Melinda Rackham: ‘Counter Histories’ exhibition by Chris Aerfeldt & Chelsea Lehmann at Praxis Artspace, 2021
There is an implied wonder, almost a sense of romance to the gaze. As we look with steady intent, fixing our eyes with studious attention, eager to see, anticipating surprise. But when does a gaze shift from gentle admiration to a scrutiny that causes discomfort; to a glare that stares you down; or an ogle that becomes a lascivious leer?
La Pintora Australian Chris Aerfeldt Presenta Dijous Al Muxart ‘The Heroine’s Journey’
Ajuntament de Martorell, 2018 (Catalan)
El Muxart Espai d’Art inaugura dijous, a les 20.00h, The Heroine’s Journey, una exposició d’obres hiperrealistes de gran format de la pintora Chris Aerfeldt. L’artista va començar a exposar als anys 90 i, actualment, és una de les creadores australianes més reconegudes en el panorama artstic…
Le Grand Manège de la Femme de Menage
Art Dans l’Air magazine, Anne Devailly, 2015 (français)
Il y a beaucoup de femmes, des ménagères dans les toiles de Chris Aerfeldt. Des femmes aux prises avec un quotidien terre-à-terre qu’elles parviennent à sublimer. Quand le plumeau prend des allures de baguette des fée…
Surréalisme et Féminisme en Clair-Obscur
Hérault Juridique, Virginie Moreau, 2016 (français)
Australienne d’origine, fille de migrants estoniens, Chris Aerfeldt s’est installée à Montpellier il y a quelques années avec son époux français…
Chris Aerfeldt
Artist Profile Magazine, Lisa Omagari, 2012
For contemporary artist Chris Aerfeldt painting is a compulsive way of dealing with the world. In her works women with physical oddities engage in popular acts, perhaps her way of exposing her favour towards the ‘unfashionable’…
Be Prepared
Solo exhibition Helen Gory Gallery at the Melbourne Art Fair 2012, Dr Ken Wach
Chris Aerfeldt’s compelling paintings strike a hidden chord - what you see is what you don’t get.
Her paintings home in on the fake promises, the yearning, the anxious wait, the hidden desires and the surface rituals of daily life – it’s all there.
Aerfeldt’s deftly handled paintings are tableaus of a type of underlying self-talk – a pictorial spill-out of everyday issues and earnest longings
Aerfeldt Painter
Artstate Magazine, Maureen Gordon, 2009
“I’m interested in evoking a sense of time in my work - a blurred sense of time and consciousness, where the past and present merge and collide, where memory and the present moment combine.” Chris Aerfeldt
Aerfeldt wrote this about her Heav’n & Hell exhibition of 2004 - she was referring back into the past times of childhood. In 2008 as I watched the artist working on new paintings for the Wyer Gallery I began to think that the same sentiment still prevailed, though with a different significance, perhaps a vaster sense of time, a more massive import…
Flying Visitation
Helen Gory Gallery, Catalogue Essay, Wendy Walker 2006
Working from her now characteristic digital manipulations of old master imagery and kitsch figurines or dolls, Aerfeldt paints with a consuming intensity and palette that resonates with rich colour…
Heav’n & Hell
Solo exhibition, Helen Gory Galerie, Essay Edward Colless, 2004
Nothing happens in heaven. Heaven is beyond any narrative,beyond any scene. An annulling transcendence of all the strife and the pleasure and pain of history, heaven is the end of the story. In hell, on the other hand, everything happens. Its punishments are the spectacular repetition - infinite in scale, but infinitely repeated in the one undying moment - of all our excesses. Hell is too much of a good thing.