Chris Casali

2023 Taoyuan International Watercolor Biennale

Happy to be invited to participate in the 2023 Taoyuan International Watercolor Biennale which opens December 1st. See below for more details.

I'm so proud to be invited to judge this year's Kedumba drawing award. Australia's oldest and revered drawing collection. The winning work collected was Teo Treloar's drawing 'Still'. Highly recommended was Nic Plowman's drawing 'Baby', congratulations to you both.

You can learn more about Kedumba and the collection here, it's amazing collection with a very important history.

The Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawings

Drawing 1: Teo Tralour , Image 2: Nic Plowman

Opens on Saturday at 3pm, hope to see you there.

.

For more information visit Stanley Street socials to access the exhibition catalogue, artist talk and opening celebration bookings.

.

‘Gestures’, a group exhibition I’m in curated by Michelle Chanique at Stanley Street Gallery, Sydney.

Gestures often referring to nonverbal communication, are a felt experience. They can be intentional or unintentional, widely recognised or small and intimate. The exhibition Gesture, curated by Michelle Chanique brings together four artists to develop this conversation, thinking about non-verbal languages in surface, medium, and physical movement. 

Chelsea Lehmann’s painting Pleasure Treatise is the starting point of the show. The entwined bodies converge narrative with loose brushstrokes, creating a surface of tangled abundance. With an apple in one palm and a harp in another the faceless figures caught in fervent embrace fill the canvas with baroque sensuality. The artist’s technical rigor blends traditional techniques of chiaroscuro with contemporary abstraction, playing with notions of creation and censorship. 

The work of Tanya Linney push the painterly movement of Lehmann’s work even further. Linney strips back the idea of gesture to a raw extent, simplifying and expanding the brushstroke across the canvas. Exploring scale and colour, the effect is visceral, giving an immediate sense of vitality and wildness to the painted surface. 

In contrast to the spirit of Linney’s work, Chris Casali’s breathtaking detail reminds us to take a moment and pause. Sitting within an environmental framework, each surface invites a personal encounter with the natural world. Casali’s intricate and careful abstraction considers what it means to connect and experience kinship with nature. 

The work of Ben King disrupts the conversation between the walls, pulling the audience back towards the idea of gesture as physical and performative. His ceramic sculptures are whimsical and nostalgic, drawing on childhood memory. The rough surfaces have a painterly quality, evoking the visceral interaction between the clay and the artist, exploring sensation and suggestion rather than realism. 

Responding directly to the practices of the four artists, Chanique’s curation initiates a conversation around medium, surface and physical movement. In many ways, the three painters reveal the sensibility and tactility of a sculptor. On the other hand, the sculptor’s work is evocative of painterly gesture. This tension plays with our lens of perception, reminding us that it is important to view things in a different manner and live outside category. 

- Claire de Carteret

Image: Chris Casali, Untitled; Study of Contrasts #1, acrylic on canvas, 1680 mm x 1525 mm

I’m humbled to have my painting ‘Blue Note’ shortlisted in the 2023 Ravenswood Women’s Art Prize.

Entry Statement

Chris Casali leads an intuitive art practice, one that draws inspiration from places she inhabits. Through observation and discovery, her practice is a ruminating existence that links the past into the present and its future. A slow revelation of detail that causes the work to be always giving and not predictable, an art practice without restriction or barriers.   Her painting Blue Note is an extension of this process, with a fresh eye, she explores the illumination of colour using shifts of metallic and iridescent surface treatments. New work in colour, to sit alongside her detailed graphite watercolours, thus challenging the relationships of an artists’ practice. Choices made to broaden studio exploration in materiality, touch, and the artists obsession to create.   Chris was awarded the Ravenswood 2019 Emerging Artist Prize with her graphite  watercolour, Mutawintji Dreaming. This entry as like her previous work was inspired by recent travels to central Australia.

What a joy to work with Slot Gallery, an independent artist run space that gives artists an opportunity to publicly show experimental work 24/7. So much fun it was, thank you slotwindowgallery 'Blue Note' 

Acrylic on Canvas, 1524 x 1676mm

Until February 4th, 38 Botany Road, Alexandria

Text From Slot Gallery

This isn’t what Chris Casali intended to show in SLOT.

She broke the news gently in an email – “I was in two minds…what to show …. I have been developing new work alongside my watercolours and thought to show a painting …Like most of my work it's abstract with hints to the land…Is it a problem…I've never shown work like this before… Hmmmm just not sure that's all and thought to write.”

Not being sure might be the prevailing state of mind for an artist. If so, becoming sure would be their aim and working out what they can be sure of would be what they do. In conversation Chris described it as her process, that is how she goes about making a painting. “It’s a slow revelation of detail that causes the work to be always giving and not predictable” is how she put it.

There are romantic edges to Chris’s process. She described travelling with friends through the Australian desert, of making paintings on the ground and drying them in the branches of trees. But mainly it happens for Chris in her studio. A room, like most other studios, more or less empty and away from most other things where a kind of meditation begins. One thing leads to another, which often enough seems to be an act of desperation. Because like a caged animal, artists will try anything, take any risk to realise their work, in a bid for freedom that remains nothing more than a half-glimpsed possibility.

And so it might be with Chris’s painting. A single sweeping gesture poured over a deftly crafted canvas that hints at details drawn in the landscape. Is this a rock pool with a crest of foam left as the tide recedes?  Or a kind of Xray of the desert she recently visited? A landscape perversely sculpted by water – driven by the same gravity that dictates the flows and splashes of Chris’s paint, applied in hope of realising sureness. It is however, whatever you see it as.

But how does Chris see it? – exactly as you see it here. Not the step before, or the step after that she might have taken next – it is this step that she is sure of. The watercolour on paper that became an acrylic painting on canvas that replaced her planed exhibit in a process, where possibilities are examined without predigest, is of course exactly what Chris Casali intended to show in SLOT. This is the summation of her process.

Tony Twigg

ABOUT SLOT

SLOT is an independent window gallery dedicated to bringing art to the street. On the busy street between Redfern, Waterloo and Alexandria, the window has captured passersbys' and Sydney commuters' attentions for more than 12 years. Exhibitions can be viewed 24 hours from the street.

FINALIST - SPLASH McCLELLAND CONTEMPORARY WATERCOLOUR AWARD 2021 - McCLELLAND SCULPTURE PARK AND GALLERY

Wonderful news and proud to be selected as a  finalist in the acquisitive 2021 Splash McClelland Contemporary Watercolour Award with my work ‘Cinder’, 2019/2020.

Very happy to have my work ‘Wollemi’ selected to travel in the  DOBELL DRAWING PRIZE #22. If near by drop into one of the following venues ... Make sure to check the gallery website prior to your visit as dates may slightly change.

Gosford Art Gallery 17 July – 12 September 2021

Logan Art Gallery, QLD 3 December 2021 – 22 January 2022

Bank Art Museum Moree 20 February – 13 April 2022

Cowra Regional Art Gallery 25 June – 14 August 2022

Griffith Regional Art Gallery 26 August – 23 October 2022

Humbled to have my work 'Wollemi' selected for the Dobell Drawing Prize 22#, Australia. This work was created last year on residency @bigciaustralia where I'd immersed myself into the Wollemi National Park, NSW Australia. Shortly after, uncontrollable wildfires destroyed more than 500,000 hectares of bushland with ongoing ecological and biodiversity impacts continuing to threaten. The spirit of the Wollemi is deeply engrained in this work, and artistic voice is my attempt to respect what we have and what has been lost. 

The exhibition opens from 26 March 2021 - 22 May 2021. Below is the entry artist statement about this work.

...

A deep dive into the subconscious; an artists’ obsession in line and form.

Drawing consumes us all; it sits within all elements of art and life. It’s a process of seeing, thinking and watching.

I lead a process-driven practice that’s obsessed with detail, structure and form. An illustrative and automatic response, that functions between a controlled consciousness and intuitive response.

On residency this year I focused my research on ideas around Influence and Social Consciousness; The Power of the Arts in association with Activism. 

I spent my time exploring artistic practice both nationally and internationally and how creatives interact with issues that have the power to incite or influence public change and activism.

This research culminated in a public lecture that was delivered at the Big Ci open day. It allowed room to deliver and debate the currency of our times and the roles, responsibilities and opportunities artists have as a global citizen, creative thinker and maker.

In conclusion, I am excited to see where these ideas go and the conversation this project can incite, debate and possibly influence.

My residency was great and on completion of my stay at the Big Ci Bilpin I was asked to write a few words about this experience ...

I am very proud to have won the Emerging Artist Category in the 2019 Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prize. Above is the winning artwork that was also my 2018 Master of Fine Art graduate work from UNSWAD.