Kate Gottgens:A String of Signs

Huxley-Parlour is pleased to present A String of Signs, the first UK exhibition by South African artist Kate Gottgens. With a focus on the suburban domestic, Gottgens explores nostalgia, entropy and the ephemeral. Her work is, in part, inspired by writings of Roland Barthes, for whom all images carry the possibility of multiple meanings: a ‘floating chain of signifieds.’

Comprising 12 new canvases, and a group of new monotypes, the exhibition consists of imagined scenes constructed from de-contexualised imagery drawn from an extensive archive of found, vernacular photographs. Gottgens interrupts an otherwise photographic sense of reality in her canvases with passages of indistinction, self-cancellation or abrasion, echoing the faded, degraded nature of the photographs that gave rise to them. In reappropriating historic imagery, Gottgens seeks to reduce time to a single moment, captured in a single frame of past, present and future. Using intense colour and washes or veils of paint she disturbs and effaces her scenes and figures, resisting the fixity or certainty of objecthood and subjecthood.