Christine Maudy
Project: Artist book
Client: Christine Maudy
View Project: pdf file
Sunshine Coast based artist Christine Maudy employed Working Planet to design this survey of paintings and essays.
Excerpt from essay by Sandra Conte Curator
Christine Sanson Maudy is a peripatetic, French-Australian abstract artist whose oeuvre comprises ten years of 275 breathtaking works, 23 solo exhibitions and over 60 group shows.
Maudy’s contemporary style reflects her persona – elegant, unique, intellectual and focused. Her arts practice transcends cultural barriers and melts geographical borders as evidenced in the illustrations of her exquisite compositions. Intuitively distilling and translating worldwide observations over a variety of themes, Maudy marries these with her instinctive use of brush, paint and mixed media to articulate emotional concepts. As such, her work resonates with international collectors, corporations, critics, gallerists and viewers.
Maudy’s inspired compositions are borne of an artistic journey starting with an epiphany in Africa, which later resulted in the work ‘African Dance’. Acknowledged as pivotal to her oeuvre, Maudy highlights the work as a depiction of emotion, not landscape and, in her words, “A celebration of a turning point in my life. A journey in Africa in 1989 was the emotional shock that changed my life. For the first time I had the feeling of being connected to the land. Africa gave me inspiration to change my life and follow my heart, from there I looked at the world differently.”1
Charting her artistic course, Maudy shifted from her former professions as fashion designer and public relations director in Paris, relocating to be a full time practicing artist based in Australia. Indicating it was the regular travels to Africa, Morocco and Spain for more than 10 years and then settling on Australia’s Sunshine Coast, that inspired her first body of work, Maudy also states “I find my inspiration in memories, experiences and dreams,” as shown in her 2004 work, ‘Midnight Dream’.
Following a decade of prolific output and exhibitions throughout France, Hong Kong, Italy, Spain, Canada, The United Arab Emirates and Australia, Maudy’s artistic career is brought full circle to the March, 2011 ’Three women, No Frontiers’ survey show. Housed in the same art gallery as her first solo exhibition of 2001, Maudy’s work now finds central place in the main gallery, symbolic of her having ‘arrived’ as an established artist, with the exhibition doubling as a marker for the global centenary celebrations of International Women’s Day. 2
By producing works of global commentary Maudy has addressed environmental issues, highlighted political injustices and challenged transgressions of human rights. In calling the viewer to attention with pieces such as ‘September 11’ or the ‘Cries and Whispers’ exhibition, which showed in Hong Kong, Madrid and Brisbane, Maudy carefully constructs her compositions to deliver an all pervading stillness thus revealing the maturity of a critical, rather than combative, approach toward acknowledging the silences of many. Works such as ‘Rumours’, ‘Whispers’ and ‘Muted Voices’, are dedications to those under dictatorial and ‘democratic’ regimes whether it be in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Burma, detention camps, prisoners of war, refugees, victims of terrorism and racism.
