Kate Gottgens South Africa, b. 1965

In Kate Gottgens’ paintings, light and shadow dissolve into each other, forming liminal spaces that hover between memory and dream. Figures emerge and recede, absorbed by their surroundings, their presence both familiar and elusive. Glowing pools, dense forests, and hazy suburban scenes unfold in compositions that feel at once cinematic and deeply personal—anchored in specific imagery yet resisting clear narratives. Gottgens constructs her works from fragments: found photographs, digital ephemera, and personal snapshots, stripping them of their original contexts to create a language entirely her own.

 

Her paintings engage with the tension between beauty and unease, layering atmospheric veils of colour with unsettling undercurrents. The water, a recurring motif, is never static—it shimmers, distorts, and transforms, mirroring the ambiguous nature of her subjects. Moments of stillness are tinged with the suggestion of something just beneath the surface, evoking a sense of nostalgia that is at once tender and disquieting. The past lingers in her work—not as a fixed recollection, but as something fluid and shifting, like an old memory revisited with the knowledge of time. Through this interplay, Gottgens explores the seductive yet deceptive nature of nostalgia. The pull of this yearning can be dangerously alluring, smoothing over complexities and transforming history into a sentimentalized illusion. This, what she refers to as the "chocolate-box cliché," is subtly punctured in her work, as she exposes the underbelly of these idealized memories of the past.

 

Born in Durban, South Africa, in 1965, and based in Cape Town, Gottgens studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Her paintings have been widely exhibited in South Africa and internationally, with works held in prominent collections such as the Pérez Collection in Miami, the Cassatt Foundation in Amsterdam, and the Luciano Benetton Collection in Treviso. With a painterly language that oscillates between the past and present, nostalgia and critique, she constructs images that remain just out of reach— like a dream remembered in fragments, slipping away even as it takes shape.