The Situation of a Rose

Notes

Her protagonists are amoeba-like, enacting dramas of desire as they pull apart, stretch towards each other, and converge. Her narrative is intuitively expressed through amorphous lines and earthy colour palettes on rough, raw canvas, creating a world which feels primordial—her landscapes are simultaneously alien and familiar. There is no negative space, and often no clear foreground or background or delineation between subjects and their settings. These ambiguities of composition are furthered by her deft use of scrim, a material whose open weave offers both translucency and solidity, applied to surfaces in layers like leaves of paper which can be paged through. Gaigher metabolises a broad array of aesthetic approaches, cultural references, and lived experiences which she continuously departs from and returns to. In the absence of faces, her subjects communicate through their limbs, organs, cells. She is interested in expressions of desire and romance; the nature of being an organism in relation to other organisms; language and the acts of naming, taxonomising, narrating, and mythologising. Her touchstones are never explicit in the works and do not determine their reading, though they vibrate within them.

Born in 1990, Jeanne Gaigher lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. Recent solo exhibitions include love charm dialects at Blank Gallery in Cape Town (2025) Mind Middle at Paulina Caspari in Munich (2024), group- psyche at RESERVOIR in Cape Town (2023), Hot Dipping at Emanuele Catellani Contemporary in Turin (2023) and Anatomy Lesson at Wschòd in Warsaw (2022).

Selected group exhibitions include Materiality V.2 at Iziko Museum in Cape Town, Homesick for Another World at Madragoa in Lisbon (2025), Cannibal Nature at Baró Galeria in Mallorca (2025), my galaxy at Paulina Caspari in Munich (2025), Memories We Have Forgotten at The Address Gallery in Brescia (2024), and The Sieve of Secrecy at Paulina Caspari and beacon in Munich (2023). Recognitions include the ARCO Madrid Young Talent Award 2025 and residencies such as tac.residency in Tuscany, Italy and the Villa Filanda Antonini residency under the Arper Feltrin Foundation.