artist profile

Biography

Chalie MacRae is a self-taught abstract artist based in Melbourne, Australia.

At the centre of her work is an ongoing inquiry into pace and perception. Her practice emerges from a desire to reconnect with personal rhythm, presence, and lived experience within contemporary life.

Through walking, observing, and spending time within Australian landscapes, she develops a sensitivity to subtle shifts in light, weather, movement, and atmosphere. These experiences are not captured directly, but carried through painting into what she describes as echoes of place.

Chalie’s studio practice functions as a space of translation. Layers of paint are built gradually through gesture, intuition, and reflection, with each work emerging through a quiet dialogue of energy, memory, and feeling. While informed by the Australian landscape, her paintings move beyond representation, instead evoking states of calmness, openness, and presence.

In a world shaped by noise, urgency, productivity, comparison, and constant stimulation, Chalie feels a quiet pull toward slowing down and reconnecting with what matters. Her work responds to this through a practice grounded in slowness, perception, and embodied experience, offering a visual language that invites pause and reflection.

Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions and is held in private collections both across Australia and internationally. Her paintings have been commissioned by collectors and interior designers for private residences locally and abroad, featured in national media, on screen, and exhibited multiple times at the internationally recognised Affordable Art Fair in Melbourne.

In 2023, she transformed an industrial warehouse in Yarraville, Melbourne’s inner west, into her studio and gallery space. Chalie continues to develop and present her work from this space, as well as through selected Australian galleries.

Artist Statement

‘My work responds to the pressure and pace of modern life. I seek to offer a counter-narrative that values mindfulness through art and connection to nature’s beauty.

Working intuitively in a gestural style it’s my intention to create works that echo the Australian landscape yet blur the lines between reality and abstraction, inviting viewers to connect with the work in their own way.

I embrace the process of letting go, welcoming the unexpected. This mirrors nature’s unpredictability, and through painting I find my way back to the landscape.’

— Chalie MacRae