The Eternal Stare by Christina Conrad

Christina Conrad

THE ETERNAL STARE

The Eternal Stare by Christina Conrad

Aesthete Gallery is privileged to exhibit the compelling and unique clay icons and masks of internationally acclaimed tribal artist, Christina Conrad.

Born in New Zealand in 1942, Conrad is the daughter of the English painter Patrick Hayman and is an internationally recognised artist, poet, playwright and sculptor.  Conrad’s art is strikingly original and not easily pigeon-holed.  She calls herself a tribal artist, one of the lost tribe.

Ian Wedde in his essay, “Christina Conrad, Visionary Logic”, writes “Conrad’s art is never secular; it always conveys a deep tone of mystical or spiritual importance – of the fundamental, factual, logical nature of such experience.  And while this kind of perception is often attributed to ‘primitive’ non-Western cultures and to polytheistic or animistic religions, and while the modelling of Conrad’s figures obviously owes something to Modernist primitivism, Conrad’s links are really old European ones.  Her art reaches back to a mediaeval, or Gothic, iconography”.

Conrad’s life as a creator has been influenced by the principles of the 13th Century Cathars of southern France.  All of her works are strikingly emotional, and profoundly philosophical.  When asked how she might characterize her work, she laughs:   “you mean the spillings of the unconscious!”.

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