Chris Wise is a Sydney-based abstract painter inspired by landscape and expressive mark-making.

Born in London, Chris has always had an affinity for working plein air, with large-scale works made overnight in Hampshire’s New Forest culminating in a First-class BA Hons in Fine Art Painting in 1998.

More recently, Chris has been a finalist in notable Australian art prizes, including the 2024 National Contemporary Art Prize and the 2024 Paddington Art Prize, where he was a non-acquisitive winner.

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For Chris, painting is innate, an intuitive reaction to a deep and indescribable compulsion – compelling him to interpret and articulate feelings, thoughts, observations and ideas through abstract expression. Chris’s approach to painting merges spontaneous automatism with deliberate gestural abstraction. Through a balance of conscious intention and unconscious instinctiveness, he aims to build a connection between process, materiality and surface, which is both impulsive and intuitive. 

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Working from his light-filled studio in Glebe, in Sydney’s Inner West, Chris continues to push his practice forward. Over 2024/2025, Chris has undertaken many self-funded residencies on Gundungurra Country in regional NSW, producing a series of large-scale plein air works titled ‘The Golspie Paintings’ which will be exhibited to a wider audience in 2025.

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