Notes

Artist's Bio

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.

“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 ...The violence we perceive is not depicted explicitly; rather it is embodied in the medium of paint. On closer examination, the intricate and nuanced workmanship of the paintings comes to the fore as an exceptional characteristic of the vision which the artist shares with the viewer. The raw pigment is repeatedly interwoven and interlaced into grainy textures and layered surfaces. The manner in which the artist has approached the creation process has resulted in an extraordinary variety of exceptional marks and motifs – sometimes applied energetically, brusquely and even violently, at times rashly and aggressively, on other occasions with extreme skill and with a refined and sophisticated touch. The emotional conviction and power of these obsessive marks and textures lies in the pulsing colour nuances with which they have been fashioned. The charged energy of mark-making on these canvases broadens into imaginary spaces and fields of force that captivate the viewer.” – Simon Van Berg