CLAIRE GAVRONSKY

Building on her 2024 solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery London, ‘Drawn Together’, Claire Gavronsky’s current series of paintings addresses how women and children endure and survive situations of extreme adversity, by virtue of their generosity and support of one another. The work is a response to ongoing global conflicts, where survival depends on solidarity, sharing intimate moments of human connection, embracing, holding and caring, as forms of resistance and healing.

In her pink monochrome paintings of encounters between two women, the fine, graceful and precise line drawings capture two older women poised in empathetic gestures of deep affection and understanding. Gavronsky deliberately strips away colour and background context to focus on the emotional and physical language between the subjects. The paintings propose a form of benevolence and compassion that speaks across time and place. In ‘What we have seen’, two women stand together, one behind the other, one woman’s hand gently placed on the other’s shoulder, both gazing upward with expressions that could be shock, fear or astonishment. In the two paintings, ‘To have and to hold’, and ‘From this day on’, the care within the relationship speaks of a profound psychological and spiritual bond.

Gavronsky’s paintings about the disturbing subject of femicide, ‘Never another’ and ‘Enough’, speak to the tragedy, the shared grief among women, as well as reflecting their resistance, with community support and without generating further anger and cruelty. Often, a figure turns their gaze towards the viewer, implicating them in the situation.

In the paintings of groups of children, ‘Distracting the children’ and ‘Choosing other worlds’, the works address themes of survival under attack, basic human empathy and the urgency of reparation. The children align themselves with the vulnerability of animals by donning masks and costumes. Colour is accentuated, bold and vivacious, giving the paintings a clamour and a vibrant energy. Children have the capacity to speak from a position of innocence, but also, very directly, they have the ability to pose questions in unjust situations that adults might not be able to.

Gavronsky’s compositions deliberately place viewers within the supportive circles of the women, all the more so through the scale of the paintings and the life-size figures. Colour is harmonious, contributing to the coherence of the groups. She creates works that go beyond specific periods or geographies while addressing universal experiences of loss, conflict, cruelty and inventive, loving solidarity.

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Claire Gavronsky (b. 1957, Johannesburg) works in a varietyof mediums, most notably in painting and sculpture. Herwork often uses visual references to historical paintings, andcues are sometimes taken from events from everyday life.Memory, racism, violence against women and children aresome of the themes which run through her oeuvre.

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Notable solo and group exhibitions include: Mirror of theMind: Figuration in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, El Espacio23, Miami (2024); Viewing Room exhibitions, GoodmanGallery, London, (2024), Io e Me. Autoritratti nel Lockdown.Sala 1, Centro Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome(2021); Speechless with Rose Shakinovsky, Goodman Gallery,Cape Town (2018); Right to the Future, Museum of 20th and21st Century Art, St Petersburg (2017); Colour Theory withRose Shakinovsky, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2014);Dakar Biennale, Dakar (2010); and Dystopia, collaborationwith William Kentridge, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Ghent(2009-2010).