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"Dali is Not Crazy" finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2008

1.5 x1.2m 78 x48" oil & acrylic on linen

Chris Wake was selected as a finalist for the 2008 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. The standard was very high with over 1100 artists nominated by respected art dealers. The prestigious international art prize covers the whole of Asia with only 30 finalists selected, and is held in Hong Kong. The European Sovereign art prize is held in London. Paintings were exhibited at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art Singapore and then in Hong Kong for final judging. Eminent Judges came from all over the world including curators from the Tate Modern and the Guggenheim Museum. Chris Wake achieved the second highest price at the Sothebys auction $20,000AUD and missed out on the peoples choice award by only a few votes.

Nomination

Nominated By: Georgie Bruce
Supporting Statement: What lies behind the faces that we show to the world is a constant theme for Adelaide Hills artist Chris Wake.
Characters have Nolanesque eyes that follow the viewer, or look sideways in unease or alarm. Tilted heads turn away from each other creating a sense that in spite of the festive setting characters are caught in their own private and possibly nightmare universes. The effect is droll and somehow disturbing.

For this artist, painting is an escape that began during a childhood that was indeed a nightmare.
(“I had an abusive stepfather. Childhood was a dreadful part of my life so I was propelled to create a life for myself that was psychologically as far away from that reality as possible.”)

She began with still life and landscapes, “that make one feel uplifted when looking at them”, and has deliberately avoided ˜morbid, confronting bloodthirsty work, yet her works confront in more subtle ways. A recent series dwelt on the dinner party scene; women in evening dress and pearls, men in black tie outfits, drinking, laughing and apparently making merry, but with the same dark undertones that appear in the current paintings; desperate eyes and a sense of artifice, of lack of real engagement, of people caught in their own dark interior worlds.

These large oils on canvas exude a kind of wild energy, as if the characters are caught in a high wind. The fish eye perspective, the twisted glasses and bottles and fluid body shapes are reminiscent of Chagall. Jugglers, balls, a flying dog, a red dress, bring bright spots of colour to paintings that are otherwise rendered in neutral greys and browns. A strange raft of often recurring characters float and fly across the canvas. ˜Acrobat girl” (Not me!) insists the artist unconvincingly), is a wispy childlike figure which flies above the action, watching and having different adventures in each scene. She frolics around like an untamed adolescent female spirit, playing ping pong in one painting, dancing naked except for boots and gloves in another .

Although she worked in narrative form in the past in 2003 she produced a Ned Kelly series that featured alongside Sydney Nolan works in a theatre production at the New Zealand Festival of Arts, she prefers in her current series to tease viewers into finding their own meanings. Most of the paintings seem to have a curious story to tell for example in Journey to New lands an odd boatload including an opera diva and a worried looking man in a black captain hat are setting off, accompanied by a fellow sea traveller in a very unseaworthy-looking shopping trolley.

That shopping trolley and other odd objects like toasters which often appear in the corners of her paintings are, she says, intended as subtle environmental messages and is a statement about the environment and how our choices to use these things have an effect on the environment we live in.

Wake is now getting a lot of attention and exposure in major international cities including Singapore and Hong Kong, which is a long way from her restored studio escape in the Mt Lofty Ranges and it is an even longer way from being a small unhappy girl using art as an escape from reality.

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