Kristina Huxley’s work is situated within a hybrid and expanded painterly practice that explores indeterminacy, change, impossibility, technology and visual perception holding traces of contemporary time, realities and narratives observed from within our turning, unstable and volatile world.

Subjects and narratives that evade definition and measure, enable conflict, violence and disaster become departure points for transience to become a constant and permanent form and dimension within the work. She has been making site sensitive paintings and installations since graduating from The Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford University in 1995. After completing a research period at The Bergen Academy of Art and Design (KHiB), the first heat sensitive paintings were developed and exhibited in 1998 in Ireland. She completed her MFA at NCAD, Dublin in 1999. She currently lives and works in Dublin, Ireland.

Painting for Huxley is sensitive; weighted by its own history painting is an intervention, is interactive and expanding with an inherent capacity to slow things down. With subjects such as heat, dust and debris, she hijacks painting’s unfathomable and innate abilities: radiance, subversion, hybridisation, ambiguity and exploits painting’s potential to make visibility and invisibility inseparable and real. Activated by the public and context her paintings are in motion, changing surface quality, colour and palette as the viewer moves and observes. They produce surface territories that are permanent yet permanently changing, delivering dialogue between phenomenology and ontology, perception and memory, the visual and physical and the contemporary sensing of temporal and atemporal worlds.

Huxley has exhibited internationally and extensively in Ireland including at The Royal Hibernian Academy and The Irish Museum of Modern Art. Her work is held in Irish and International public and private collections and was most recently acquired by the The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Mark Rothko Art Centre in Latvia. She has been the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards notably from The Leverhulme Trust, The Arts Council of Ireland and Culture Ireland. She has been the recipient of several residencies including The Irish Museum of Modern Art and The Mark Rothko Art Centre in Latvia.

Kristina has also taught and lectured at institutions across Europe. She is a lecturer at NCAD, Dublin and founder of Painttube: A Network of Painting Practitioners.

Kristina is currently showing The Sensitive Paintings | 2023 in a group show at Farmleigh Gallery, at The Farmleigh House and Estate in The Phoenix Park, Dublin, Ireland. The 2023 nagGallery/nagOffsite installation in Farmleigh Gallery incorporates some of the previously explored themes under the exhibition title ‘white engenders black’.  The title was taken from a piece of text ’Personal Reflections on Ashes’ by Tanikawa Shuntaro. 

The exhibition runs from 14th November 2023 until 18th February 2024. Preview at: https://www.farmleigh.ie/gallery/