Of particular interest is the work of Christine Aerfeldt, recipient of a Samstag Scholarship this year. She has proven herself as a painter of spectacular ability; her content reflects enduring memories of childhood tainted with the everpresent threat of nightmare – painted with meticulous technique. Here she veers in new directions, depicting real ponies or perhaps rocking horses, and elegant Baroque women. The large work on paper is especially powerful with its charcoal lines and background…

Adam Dutkiewicz, Emerging artists find fresh expression, The Independent Weekly, Sept 2 2006

Traditional oil painting techniques are superbly practiced by Aerfeldt, a graduate of Adelaide Central School of Art, and its rigorous tonal oil painting classes led by Anna Platten. Hailing from an Estonian background, Aerfeldt examines cultural traditions and expectations by mixing kitsch images of dolls and toys with facsimilies of works by Old Masters such as El Greco and Van Dyck. Aerfeldt removes the centerpiece of their paintings and repaints them with a central image chosen by her. She does not construe her work as appropriating or imitating the past but as creating psychological spaces that necessarily contain cultural material.

Stephanie Radok, Art Gallery Guide, Australia, November 2006

…Her present paintings explore a fetish with horses, grooming and femininity and are technically more complex than her early work, although equally enigmatic…

Margot Osborne, Young talent time, The Advertiser, Oct 14 2006

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1

Christine Aerfeldt creates psycho-dramas in which ‘dolls invent and play out stories’ as a pretext for the artist to explore her own ‘suppressed’ subconscious mind. In her paintings and digital prints she stacks up detail, aiming for ‘maximalism’ – an excess of information that blurs past and present, consciousness and memory.

The prototypes for the dolls are in collections owned by Aerfeldt’s maternal relatives. Wearing quasi-Estonian/German national costumes, Friedrich and Liesl, Erika and Rolf, Gretl and Kurt, Wilhelm and Wanda perform their roles in slightly surreal and out of context settings that have been adapted from paintings in the Prado Museum.

Despite their Germanic character, these dolls are subject to dramatic ‘Alice in Wonderland-like transformations’ in scale and contradictory behavioural traits; nasty as well as nice, pretty and mean: ‘The Sound of Music meets the Grimm-est of Fairy tales’.

Heav’n & Hell, Imprint Magazine, March 2004

EXHIBITION: Heav’n & Hell, Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne, May 2004