Huxley-Parlour is delighted to present The Hope of Trees, an exhibition of new monotypes by Kate Gottgens at its Wiltshire gallery. These unique works on paper continue the artist’s exploration of leisure, ennui and the vernacular, where the boundaries between figure and landscape dissolve into gestural mark-making and washes of colour. Gottgens’ work describes a transient world where more is suggested than initially seen.
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.