Kristina Tsoulis-Reay
Dr Kristina Tsoulis-Reay
Kristina Tsoulis Reay is an artist and educator with an interest in painting and image-based art practice. For over fifteen years her work has entailed remaking family photographs and films through a primary practice of painting. Her work is concerned with the inherent complexity of autobiographical images, which entail multiple versions and complicate access to a singular narrative or ‘truth.’ The virtual, unfixed qualities of such images are evoked in her paintings through the liquid properties of paint.
In 2023 Kristina completed her PhD in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University. Her research provided an original account of how images operate on the psyche and can function in unpredictable and vivid ways, much like memory. Drawing on the feminist method of Autotheory, her writing and painting were inflected with autobiographical vignettes that unfurled in conversation with topics of social, political, and cultural significance – including migration, colonisation, loss of homeland, and intergenerational familial relationships. Her written exegesis proposed the image as a framework, or methodology, for re-thinking how artworks are encountered by makers, viewers and critical audiences.
Kristina has exhibited her work widely across the artist-run and commercial sector in spaces such as Sutton Gallery, Gallery 9, West Space, Lon Gallery, Milani Gallery, Caves, The Centre for Contemporary Photography and TCB. Her work was included in the Australian painting retrospective 'Painting. More Painting' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2016). Recent exhibitions include 'Photodoubles,' Caves (2025); 'Love Labour Lost,' Mary Cherry (2024); 'Dwellings,' Stockroom Kyneton (2024); 'Windows for Mirrors,' MADA Gallery (2023); 'Rondures,' Lon Gallery (2021); 'Bloom Shadow Circle,' Caves (2020); 'Movements,' Gallery 9 (2017).