Artists

Pauline Gutter, a Free-State-based South African painter and intermedia artist, was born in 1980. She obtained her BA Degree in Fine Arts (cum laude for painting) at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. She was awarded Honours Colours in Arts and Culture from the same university. She is the winner of the prestigious 2013 ABSA L`Atelier competition and was also awarded the Helgaard Steyn Award for painting in 2011. In 2012, she received the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans Award. Gutter’s works are included in the following museums and corporate collections: Bibliothèque nationale de France (France), Luciano Benetton Collection (Italy), Oliewenhuis Art Museum, University of Stellenbosch, North-West University, University of the Free State, William Humphrey’s permanent collection, the Standard Bank, Sanlam and ABSA Collections, the ATKV Collection, Dabar Wines and Ingcali Engineers.

STATEMENT FROM DIRK VAN DEN BERG: “When first encountering Pauline Gutter’s paintings on exhibition, they appear familiar to the viewer. After all, are these not ordinary domestic objects and traditional genres of landscape, portraiture and animal studies? On closer examination, however, the viewer finds no trace of cheerful neighbourly realism or pastoral rusticity in these brave and disturbing depictions of rural life, farming people and cattle. Pauline Gutter wants to understand and comprehend the substance of the land, the people and the cattle by interweaving them metaphorically into figures of each other, almost like images that are reflected mutually between three mirrors...”