africanah.org

Arena for Contemporary African, African-American and Caribbean Art

Kate Gottgens, South Africa

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Kate Gottgens at AKAA art fair Paris, December 3 until December 6, 2015.

Baggy Creeps, 2015.

About:

“The works are loosely based on found photographs, mostly culled from secondhand shops and the internet. In the hands of a less accomplished painter, this broad range of references – animals, faces, figures, places – might have devolved into a meaningless mishmash, but Gottgens has given each subject its own, singular life and at the same time convincingly linked them in a painterly universe of her own invention. She has an exquisitely refined sensitivity to paint, a rare ability to remind us of the extraordinary expressivity of the medium, turning the tired, familiar surface of a small canvas into something as haunting, as varied and melancholic, as the human skin.
Most notable is Gottgens’ palette: she is a consummate colourist. Having shown in her works made during the 80’s and 90’s that she can easily handle naturalistic colour, in this exhibition she brings her considerable skill to bear on a muted range of bitumen-browns and ashgreys, modulating here and there into cool pinks, and blues, the colour of a still, grey sky on a flat sea.” – from Andrew Putter’s review “Asleep inside you”, published at www.artthrob.co.za

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Brass Band, 2015.

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Boy in the Sun, 2013.

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Camper, 2013.

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Wandering Spirit, 2015.

Kate Gottgens was born in 1965 in Durban and currently lives and works in Cape Town. She received her Bachelor of Fine Art Degree from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Gottgens presented her first solo exhibition, Modern Wonders, in 1993 at Everard Read Contemporary Gallery, Johannesburg.