Christine Dean
Carol Jerrems Sharpies 1976 1999

Looking back at it the 90s was a bit like the 70s. At the time of making the painting Carol Jerrems Sharpies 1976 I was teaching Art History and Theory at Meadowbank TAFE and while I was there I kept thinking about Carol Jerrems who taught photography there about twenty years earlier. In both the 70s and the 90s contemporary art in Australia was completely uncommercial and artists like Jerrems and myself lived on the fly and like the painting our lives were a patchwork of sharp forms and jagged edges. Teaching Art History and Theory opened the door to making art that documents the past while eventually becoming part of it.

Christine Dean, April 2022

Biography:

Christine Dean graduated from the University of Sydney in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Art History. Subsequently she completed a Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts and a PhD at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. Christine has exhibited locally and internationally in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Toby Fine Arts, New York. In 2000 Christine was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship and in 2001 she undertook an Australia Council residency at the 18th Street Arts Complex, Los Angeles. Her works are in the collection of Artbank, Blacktown City Art Collection, Casula Powerhouse, Penrith Regional Gallery and the Lewers Bequest, Macquarie University Art Collection, National Gallery of Australia as well as numerous private collections. Christine’s art practice navigates issues related to gender, sexuality, abstraction and formalism and, since her gender transition, she has been researching the history of transgender art.