Dead Man's Float, 2017

Notes

Kate Gottgens forms part of a new vanguard of admired women painters who, over the past decade, have revolutionised South African painting. A perceptive colourist who continually evolves her palette, she moves with enviable confidence between the representational and the abstract. Her style shares affinities with Gerhard Richter’s photo paintings of the 1960s; like Richter, Gottgens destabilises her source images – often found photographs – by liquefying, hazing, and subtly altering their colour.

This transformative approach to image-making informs the present lot, a work based on a scene the artist photographed in the Cape Town suburb of Plumstead. A laconic painter, Gottgens does not lavishly describe details or flesh out scenes. The rudimentary tree flanking the sailboat in the present lot is topped with spray-painted green foliage. When she paints figures, she is similarly economical, offering only the basic architecture of gendered bodies. Faces are often left incomplete, evoking a haunting sense of anonymity and distance.

Andrew Putter (2008) Kate Gottgens at João Ferreira, Artthrob, Issue 136, online, accessed 25 July 2022.

Provenance

SMAC, Cape Town, 12 March 2018.

The Oliver Powell and Timely Investments Trust Collection.

Exhibited

SMAC, Cape Town, Tired from Smiling, 22 November 2017 to 27 January 2018.

Literature

Sean O'Toole (2017) Kate Gottgens: Paintings 2015 - 2017, Cape Town: SMAC, illustrated in colour on page 41.