Christina Zimpel was born in 1961 in Perth, Western Australia. She currently resides in New York and works from her studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She received her BA in graphic design at Curtin University, Western Australia. Her career began as an art director and illustrator for fashion magazines such as Vogue. She eventually got out on her own as a full-time artist. She now translates her sense of humor and observations of her daily life into fruity, expressive paintings of stylish women.
Zimpel’s practice centers around the idea of performance and how ordinary people deal with that. Her paintings and drawings suggest women that are not quite of this time and not quite perfect, a feeling she sometimes has herself with the rapid changes in society and social media.
Clothing is carefully edited to suggest a theatrical impression - a feeling of costume and an ever present touch of the naughty. An obsession with luscious hair twisted into a knot recalls the eccentric muse of Toulouse-Lautrec La Goulue, or highly elaborate ancient Greek and Roman coiffures and 50’s pin up girls. This aspect allows her to be expressive and free with her brushstrokes amongst an otherwise strict composition.
Zimpel’s often intense, non-realistic use of color and simplified reductive shapes with a split horizon creates a blatant feeling that there is nowhere to hide and that her subjects are fully exposed. The colors are subversive rather than soft and feminine, being drawn from her childhood memories of the sixties and seventies, glam and punk rock and the Fauvists.
Zimpel has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions all over the world. In 2022 she made her Simard Bilodeau Contemporary debut as a part of Odd & Imaginary, a group exhibition. Since then, Zimpel has exhibited twice with BEERS London, shown twice at Luxembourg Art Week, and participated in numerous group exhibitions in Asia, Europe, Australia, and the US.
