Kate Gottgens:The Hope of Trees

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. 

Kate 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. In 2014, she was the only South African artist selected for Thames & Hudson’s 100 Painters of Tomorrow, and in 2019, she received the Ampersand Fellowship Award, undertaking a residency in New York. Gottgens’ first solo exhibition, Modern Wonders, was held at Everard Read, Johannesburg (1993). Subsequent exhibitions include Symbols of the Self, Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town (2000); Savage Nature, Espacio Líquido, Gijón (2014); and The Rising Sea, NUNC Contemporary Gallery, Antwerp (2015). Recent solo exhibitions include A String of Signs, Huxley-Parlour, London (2023); Her Fine Blades, SMAC Gallery, Cape Town (2024); The Blue of Distance, Huxley-Parlour, London (2025); Darkening Dusk, Maruani Mercier, Knokke (2025); Her Own Myth, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2026); and Unsteady Realms, Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2026). Selected group exhibitions include 100 Painters of Tomorrow, One Art Space, New York (2014); I Have Made a Place, Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2021); Tales for a Stranger, The Warehouse by Maruani Mercier, Zaventem (2023); Licked by the Waves: New Bathers in Art, Museum MORE, Gorssel (2024); and Echoes of Her, Maruani Mercier, Brussels (2025). Her work was also presented at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2025. Her work is held in international collections including the Pérez Collection, Miami; Cassatt Foundation, Amsterdam; Hall Art Foundation, Germany and USA; Luciano Benetton Collection, Treviso; and Homestead Collection, Norval Foundation, Cape Town. Gottgens currnelty lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.