KATE GOTTGENS

Central to Gottgens’ practice is the collecting of found everyday photographs. Gottgens then selects and recontextualises figures and elements in environments, pulling from multiple photographs to produce a new narrative on canvas. This borrowing and dislocating from the original – often suburban – scenes defies nostalgia, enabling a looser story disconnected from an identifiable time and place, with space for critique of a collective memory. Here the beautiful exists alongside the ominous, domestic encounters with sinister underbellies.

The evolution of Gottgens’ work has seen a leaning towards translucent, ephemeral, spectral figures. Their temporal quality allows them to be imagined as existing in multiple planes. This can be seen in ‘Her own myth’, an exhibition of multi-scaled oil paintings and monoprints inspired by fairy tales and mythology alongside poetry, cinema and landscapes in woodblock ukiyo-e prints.

This body of work finds its conceptual foundation in the work of writer and painter William Blake who did not distinguish between the living and the spiritual; author Madeline Miller, known for her reinterpretations of Greek mythology from the perspective of female protagonists; and novelist and short story writer Angela Carter’s collection of gothic, feminist reimagingings of fairy tales, with female protagonists embracing their rage, ferity and desire. Gottgens takes this and constructs her own femme fatale and all-encompassing, liminal figures that are both real and spectral, givers and takers of life able to create their own worlds.

The influence of Japanese woodblock prints is seen prominently in works including ‘The Source’ (2025) and ‘To Dream a River’ (2025) with skies and horizon lines that blend from yellow to blue, seemingly real landscapes that become suspiciously dreamlike, almost impossible worlds.

Gottgens layered approach to painting produces a different treatment for each work. Beginning her application on canvas with fresh, saturated colours that fade and deepen with each layer. In paintings such as ‘Furies’, ‘Summer, sister, Seraph’ and ‘Between Worlds’ that saturation persists, while in others such as ‘A Room in a Bag of Stars’, muted, earth-tones dominate the composition.

The monoprints, produced after the paintings, offer sketch-like distillations of the themes and bodies portrayed in the paintings. Their light, provisional quality is an unwinding from the intensity of the painting process and a response to the inability to build with oil paints on paper in the same way as on canvas.

Kate Gottgens (b. 1965, Durban, South Africa) explores the subconscious and unconscious terrain of memory, repression and desire through colour-saturated, psychologically-laden paintings. Shifting between figuration and abstraction, Gottgens blends imagery, time and place to create ambiguous moments that are simultaneously atmospheric and visually seductive, with narratives strangely unsettling, even ominous.

Gottgens was the recipient of the Ampersand Fellowship Award, resulting in a residency in New York City, USA, in 2019. She was the only South African to appear in the prestigious Thames & Hudson publication, 100 Painters of Tomorrow (2014), and was featured in South African cultural analyst and art critic Ashraf Jamal’s book In the World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art (2017). She has shown in several solo and group exhibitions in South Africa and abroad, including Licked by the waves, New Bathers in Art, Museum More, Gorssel, The Netherlands (2024); Whispering of Ghosts, Boschendal Norval Art Gallery, Stellenbosch, South Africa (2022); The Rising Sea, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (NUNC), Antwerp, Belgium (2015); In Search of Imaginary World, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (NUNC), Antwerp, Belgium (2014); Symbols of the Self, University of Cape Town (UCT) Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, South Africa.

Her works are represented in collections including the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, USA; Collection Majudia, Montreal, Canada, the Leeu Collection, Franschhoek, South Africa; the Cassatt Foundation, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and the Homestead Collection housed at Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa.

Gottgens lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.