Petro$ 2005

Summary

Born in Berlin, Gunter Christmann (1939–2013) arrived in Australia 1959. Settling in Sydney, he began painting in the early 1960s, with minimal training but a prodigious talent that shaped and defined his practice. Christmann’s remarkable abstract geometric works of the 1960s evolved over the years to incorporate splatter and shaker-box paintings, as well as figurative works and, later, shuffle-box videos.

This acrylic painting is one of a series that Christmann made in the early 2000s. Titled ‘Petro$’, it was acquired for the Art and Heritage Collection in 2008. The inscription on the lower left reads ‘Extra virgin light crude $ petro $ for short’, maybe a nod to the price of getting around in a car-obsessed country. The repeated tags across the entirety of the work, perhaps 200 of them, each read ‘Oskar’. Christmann was fascinated by street art, tags especially, and created Oskar as his very own street alter-ego.