Jewel Face

Exhibited

SMAC, Cape Town, Puppy Love, 13 February to 2 April 2016.

Literature

Marelize van Zyl (2016) Georgina Gratrix, Stellenbosch: SMAC, illustrated in colour on page 97.

Notes

The present lot, Jewel Face, was exhibited as part of Gratrix's Puppy Love exhibition at SMAC in 2016. In this body of work, the artist confronts the idea of oil painting as a strictly serious medium. She creates vibrant, sculptural and kitsch imagery through her liberal application of thick oil paint on various surfaces, including canvas, paper, second-hand ceramics and other bric-a-brac.¹

Jewel Face reflects the artist's ongoing interest in domestic satire and the subversion of familiar painting genres, in this case portraiture. The work depicts what appears to be a female figure so adorned with jewels and precious stones that the ornamentation has entirely overtaken her features, likely a tongue-in-cheek subversion of traditional portraits of nobility, in which sitters proudly displayed their jewels as markers of status and wealth.

Through this work, Gratrix leans fully into the language of kitsch. Rather than aiming for painterly refinement, she embraces qualities more typically avoided in serious painting: awkward composition, the inclusion of craft material such as plastic jewels and googly eyes and vibrant, clashing colour. In doing so, she positions kitsch not as a failure of technique but as a deliberate strategy, one that questions the hierarchies of taste separating "high" art from popular or domestic visual culture.²

^1. SMAC (2016) Georgina Gratrix: Puppy Love, exhibition text, Cape Town: SMAC.

^2. LLoyd Pollack (2016) ArtThrob, The Queen of Titivation and Prink: Georgina Gratrix’s ‘Puppy Love’, online, accessed 23 July 2026.