Upcoming
18.7 – 13.9 2025
Kate Gottgens:The Blue of Distance
3–5 Swallow Street
Kate Gottgens:The Blue of Distance
18.07 – 13.09.2025
Upcoming
Hours
Monday to Friday, 10:00am – 5:30pm
Saturday, 1:30pm – 5:30pm
Gallery
3–5 Swallow Street
London
W1B 4DE
Once (2025). Kate Gottgens
A New Day (2025). Kate Gottgens
‘We love to contemplate blue…not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.’ – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Huxley-Parlour are delighted to announce The Blue of Distance, a new exhibition of paintings by Kate Gottgens. Opening at our Swallow Street gallery in July, it is the South African artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work Gottgens investigates nostalgia, journeying, and the expressive qualities of the colour blue.
The works in the exhibition continue the artist’s depiction of suburban leisure: palm fronds cast long shadows on sundrenched backyards, friends rendered in varying degrees of detail walk along a sandy beach, and children pass an afternoon in a rowing boat. The exhibition title – The Blue of Distance – taken from Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, is suggestive of a space between two points, fading perspective, and the movement across both. Caught between past and future, Gottgens explores the duality of loss and longing, her figures poised in a liminal realm between that which came before and that which they have yet to experience.
A New Day (2025). Kate Gottgens
Operating within recognisable tropes – a man pictured on the deck of a ferry boat, a woman reclines on a chair, sunbathing in her back garden, a group of women looking out along a shoreline – the familiarity of Gottgens’ subject matter is complicated by her painterly surface. This uncertainty and mutability manifests formally in her application of paint where defined mark-making imposes form against broad washes and gestural strokes. Figures and landscapes move in and out of focus, alluding to the spectral quality of the old photographs Gottgens uses as her source material. Her paintings exist at the slippages of the known and the unknown, we recognise their subjects but we do not know how they came to be there.
Gesturing to the fading of old film and the nostalgia inherent within photography, Gottgens draws influence from blue’s broader cultural and spiritual associations. Drenched in inky, greyish and icy blues, The Blue of Distance evokes a melancholia and considers the notion, posited by writer Maggie Nelson in her book Bluets, of blue as the colour of memory. In Western art history blue is laden with symbolic significance, used on the frescoed ceilings of churches depicting the heavens and the robes of the Virgin Mary. There is a spirituality to Gottgens’s paintings, in her evocatively rendered landscapes and in the introspection, the unknowability of her fleeting figures, and in where their journeys will take them.
Biography
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, and another group exhibition in 2023, 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. Gottgens lives and works in Cape Town.
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