Bio

Christina Pataialii is an MFA graduate of the Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design (2018) and is based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her large-scale canvases collide ‘the sun-bleached palette of state houses’ and gestural abstraction with a hint of figurative motifs, resulting in a genre that might be described as suburban landscape painting.

In a review of the fifth New Museum Triennial in New York (2021), in which Pataialii was the only participant from Aotearoa New Zealand, New York writer Clare Gemima noted that Pataialii’s works were ‘challenging our expectations of contemporary painting and questioning the established “rules” of colour, composition and material, [she] blurs the line between her place as an emerging contemporary painter, celebrated in the Aotearoa and international art world, and her father’s work as a house painter in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, pointing to gaps in the cultural spaces we inhabit.’

The work in Te Haerenga Collection, Ascension (2022), eloquently exemplifies this ‘gap’. At first glance it articulates, perhaps, as a set of short, over-painted concrete staircases in oblique and partially convincing profile. But then the fading or unattended nature of the ‘staircase’ painting reveals itself to be a visual game of planes and hue set, again ‘perhaps’, in a light-industrial or tract-housing estate – unremarkable and free of design and aesthetics, a cultural no-go zone.

On a formal level, however, Ascension is a sophisticated compositional reveal of positive and negative spaces. But the title is a prompt. This quiet corner contains a volumetric complexity that allows for a poetic reading, hidden in plain sight.

Pataialii received the C Art Trust Award 2021/22. Award judge, curator Stephen Cleland alluded to these multiple points of entry into her practice in his judge’s commentary: ‘Part of the attraction to her work lies in Pataialii’s fresh and liberal engagement with fundamental issues of contemporary painting. She draws on both figuration and the landscape, abstraction and gestural painting … blends “high art” and popular culture, and as a colourist continually evolves her palette in order to both draw on her personal biography and probe new and unexpected colour combinations.

Exhibitions

• 2024   McLeavey Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington: Long Walks, Quick Thoughts
  
• 2023   Aotearoa Art Fair, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: McLeavey Gallery
  
• 2022   Brisbane, Australia, The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10): A Hard Day’s Night
  
• 2021   New Museum Triennial, New York: Soft Water Hard Stone
  
• 2021   Tauranga Art Gallery: Proximity & Distance
  
• 2019   London, UK, Gasworks Residency
  
• 2017   Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington: The Tomorrow People