Darkening Dusk: Kate Gottgens

MARUANI MERCIER is proud to present Darkening Dusk, the inaugural solo exhibition of South African artist Kate Gottgens, at their Knokke gallery. Recognized for her haunting, dreamlike compositions, Gottgens crafts works that exist in a state of liminality—never fixed, always in flux, and at times elusive. Just as the fading light of dusk blurs the boundaries of day and night, her paintings evoke a sense of transition, where familiarity dissolves into something more fluid, open-ended, and mysterious.

 

Gottgens builds her work from a variety of sourced imagery—anonymous snapshots found at flea markets, family vacation photos, or fragments retrieved from the vast digital archive of the internet. Stripped of their original contexts, these images become the raw material for a process of reconstruction and transformation. This gives rise to landscapes that feel both intimate and unplaceable, imbued with an unsettling, cinematic tension. In this body of work, nature serves as both subject and entry point. The figures in her paintings appear to enter nature as much as nature enters them, dissolving the boundaries between body and environment. Water emerges as a recurring motif, not as a passive element but as a charged, transitional space. Pools reflect unnatural hues—electric blues and eerie greens—that disrupt the natural setting, generating a subtle yet palpable tension. Through this interplay, Gottgens explores the seductive yet deceptive nature of nostalgia. The pull of nostalgia 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.

 

Kate Gottgens was born in 1965, in Durban, South Africa, and is now based in Cape Town, South Africa. She graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 1987. Her work can be found in the collection of the: Pérez Collection, Miami, USA; Cassatt Foundation, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Majudia / Arsenal Contemporary in Montreal, Canada; Taylor Art Collection, Denver, USA; Luciano Benetton Collection, Treviso, Italy; The Royal Portfolio Collection, Cape Town, South Africa; The Leeu Collection, Franschhoek, South Africa; The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) Collection, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her work has also been featured in 100 Painters of Tomorrow (2014) and In the World : Essays on Contemporary South African Art (2017). She was the recipient of the Ampersand Fellowship Award, UK.