Kate Gottgens

Kate Gottgens’ paintings interrupt the visual language of suburban leisure. She uses amalgamations of commonplace home photography to construct indistinct scenes which hold ambiguous and open-ended narratives.  Built from multiple de-contextualised images, the figures reject specification in time and location. Gottgens’ artistic practice exorcises the malaise that stems from the superficiality of suburban life to reveal something ‘off-kilter and menacing.’ Gottgens understands ‘entropy and collapse’ to be central to the contemporary experience and her work describes a transient world where more is suggested than initially seen. 

Gottgens was born in Durban, South Africa in 1965. She graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 1987. Her first solo exhibition, Modern Wonders, was held at Everard Read Contemporary Gallery, Johannesburg in 1993, while her international solo debut Savage Nature was shown at Espacio Liquido in Gijon, Spain in 2014. The same year her work was included in a group exhibition at One Art Space, New York. Since then she has presented five solo exhibitions across South Africa as well as in NUNC Contemporary Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. In 2019, she exhibited work at the Ampersand Foundation Award 21 years celebration exhibition, curated by Gordon Froud. In 2021, Gottgens was featured in a group exhibition I have Made a Place, Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa; she will return to Norval Art Museum for a solo exhibition opening in September 2026. In 2023, she participated in the group exhibition Licked by the Waves, New Bathers in Art, Museum More, Gorssel, Netherlands. In 2014, Gottgens was the only South African artist to be selected for the Thames & Hudson publication 100 Painters of Tomorrow. In 2015, SMAC Gallery published the book Kate Gottgens // Paintings 2007 – 2015. The second book dedicated to her work, entitled Gottgens // Paintings 2015 – 2017, was published in 2017. In his 2017 book, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art, the cultural theorist Ashraf Jamal dedicated a chapter to Gottgens’ work. Her work is held in many prestigious collections including the South African Broadcasting Corporation Collection in Johannesburg and the Pérez Collection, Miami, USA. Gottgens lives and works in Cape Town.