Christina Lucia Giuffrida (b. 1990) lives in Brooklyn, New York with her wife and their dog Vito. She has most recently exhibited with Plato Gallery (NYC), Rhodes Contemporary (UK), SoHo Revue (UK), Taymour Grahne (UK), Eve Leibe Gallery (UK), Steven Zevitas Gallery (USA), and Collar Works (USA). Her works have been featured in TOH Magazine, Front Runner Magazine, Create! Magazine, Peripheries, and Journal of the Harvard Divinity School.

Christina earned her Bachelor of Visual Art from the Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University, and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. She is a recipient of the Art Start Grant from the Australia Council and the Emerging Artist Grant from the Ian Potter Foundation and has participated in residencies in Italy, the USA, and the Dominican Republic. Christina's works are part of the MACAAL Collection (Marrakesh, Morocco), the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection (NYC), and the X Museum Collection (Beijing, China).

Artist Statement

I am making paintings about irreverent women, an endless pursuit, the escape, the relentless journeying towards a destination that no one can pinpoint, an uncertain future. It’s a carving out of my alternate reality, the bizzarro Australia that is somewhere between an astral plane and Queer-centered retro-futuristic adventure film. We watch these women on the move through this vivid chromatic landscape, where the natural world starts to collide with man-made objects, hinting at an industrialized civilization just off yonder but always out of sight.

It’s a fever dream, maybe it’s the end of the world, but these women are falling in love and driving their 4x4s off-road, barreling towards some destination with a pure, chaotic fervor. A visual reflection and meditation on my general experience of being alive—this sustained long push into this ever-changing, beautiful but hostile world.

This sense of the uncanny and absurdity is nurtured through influences such as R. Crumb, Hilary Harkness, Jim Shaw, and 19th-century Romanticism, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites. New visual layers have been added to these various influences, but my priority has always been the creative advancement of the world I am building over the pursuit of a linear reality.

What has emerged is an idiosyncratic relationship with line and shape, coupled with the blending of potent and layered environments with decisively graphic figures that unsettle the viewer’s sense of reality. Using an instinctive mix of gouache, dispersion pigments, and acrylics, the brilliant chroma of the paintings is tempered by a gritty and tactile surface of the Arches cold-pressed archival paper that is stretched and molded over wooden panels—a unique process that reminds us of painting’s potential as a material object.

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