The French-American artist Nina Childress has built a decades-spanning career around the indefatigable interrogation of ‘bad’ art and taste. Shaped by the rebellious spirit of punk rock, her approach has always been heterodox and fluid. Since the 1980s, the painter has relied on a wide variety of aesthetic strategies and styles, from blurred compositions evocative of Gerhard Richter’s photo paintings to garish oil-on-canvas recreations of 1960s nudist films. Yet despite her best efforts, these works intrigue and please the eye, colliding received notions of high and low, and scrambling oversimplified conceptions of good and bad.
