Kitty Chrystal is a visual artist working on unceded Wurundjeri land whose practice uses oil painting to explore figuration as a site of queerness, trauma and embodied experience. Drawing on aesthetics of glamour, labour, self-performance and risk, their paintings depict sexualised bodies navigating the unstable space between fantasy and survival. Through shifting perspectives, charged uses of light and shadow, and an emphasis on movement, Kitty pushes femininity toward the unruly and strange, employing camp as a strategy of amplification and resistance.

Working primarily in oil paint, Kitty engages with the conceptual and material legacies of figurative painting, positioning their work within contemporary queer and feminist discourse. Their practice moves between loose, gestural brushwork imbued with speed and play, and more tightly rendered passages informed by the traditions of European Old Master painting. By bringing visual codes from queer and sex worker subcultures into dialogue with the historical weight of oil painting, the work challenges the medium’s legacy of objectification and exclusion while reclaiming figuration as a space for agency and self-definition.