NORVAL FOUNDATION CELEBRATES REOPENING WITH FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION BY GEORGINA GRATRIX

As restrictions finally lift, visitors are once again invited to immerse themselves in the arts while social distancing in the spacious Norval Foundation galleries and sprawling Sculpture Gardens. Norval Foundation presents TheReunion: Georgina Gratrix, the

South African artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum, on view until Monday 31 May 2021.

Curated by guest curator Liese van der Watt, The Reunion brings together 25 major artworks by Gratrix, completed between 2011 and 2020, and draws upon the holdings of the Homestead Collection, based at Norval Foundation, as well as loans from private lenders.

Top: Parrot Pair, 2017 Above: A Lover's Discourse (triptych) , 2017.SILVER DIGEST // AUTUMN 2021

Georgina Gratrix (born in Mexico City, 1982) is known for paintings that feature expressive, impasto brushwork and humorous yet uncomfortable distortions of figures, objects and landscapes filtered through a colour-saturated aesthetic. Portraits of family and friends, as well as artworld insiders and popular culture icons, appear alongside oversized still-life paintings of impossibly exuberant bouquets and, to a lesser extent, verdant landscapes recalling the province of KwaZulu- Natal, where the artist grew up.

The Reunion, responding to loose themes within the artist’s practice, is divided into three parts. The first section displays Gratrix’s portraits of social figures based on images pilfered from social media platforms, newspapers, popular television series, films and society magazines. Through Gratrix’s eyes, these figures become almost archetypal and include paintings such as CEO (2014), a generic portrait of a white, male business leader, and The Appraisers (2018), a group portrait referring to the South African art industry.

All the Birthday Bouquet, 2016.

The next section contrasts these archetypal figures with portraits of the artist’s family, friends and self-portraits, conveying, through densely layered paint and unusual manipulations of the human body, something beyond the verisimilitude of the sitter. In The History of Dad (2011) Gratrix depicts a broad and ruddy stubble face with vaguely recognisable features, yet he is obscured by multiple eyes and surfaces. The bow in his hair – a recurring motif that Gratrix often uses in self-portraits – very literally imprints the artist into her father’s history and personifies the density of family relations. Also included is Nine Weeks (2020) – a series of watercolour self-portraits made by the artist, one each day, over the first 63 days of the government-mandated lockdown in South Africa due to the Covid-19 pandemic – in which the artist charts her changing mental states during this period of collective isolation.

Sterron and Maggie, 2020

Filler Face, 2020

Reluctant Bride, 2018

The Reunion (2020), the group portrait which lends its title to the exhibition, is somewhere in-between, functioning as a bridge between these two sections. It brings together members of Gratrix’s British family, such as her aunt Mavis and her police sergeant grandfather Cecil Gratrix, with various characters from British popular culture, including TV stars Father Dougal McGuire from Father Ted and Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby from Midsomer Murders. In its casual intermingling of family and popular personalities, this depiction of an imagined reunion simultaneously reflects a ‘portrait’ of the artist back at us, speaking of anglicised histories that are maintained through family ties.

The third and final section of the exhibition brings together a selection of Gratrix’s still-life paintings. Imaginative and exotic, they are paintings of the heart, filled with flowers and birds, reminiscent of the tropical vegetation of Durban where the artist spent her childhood. Often massive in scale, as in All the Birthdays Bouquet (2016), which is 2.44 metres tall and 4 metres wide, Gratrix’s still lifes are iconoclastic in the sense that the genre is characterised by far more modest dimensions. These paintings oppose the intimacy and searching scrutiny that we find in Gratrix’s portraits, as they are clearly not ‘about’ anything in the narrative sense of the word, yet speak loudly to the artist’s commitment to the medium, her singular eye, and the joy of painting that she gifts to her viewers.

The Reunion appears alongside Alt and Omega: Jackson Hlungwani and iiNyanga Zonyaka: Athi-Patra Ruga.•

Only 20 people will be allowed into Gallery 1 at a time, where The Reunion will be on view.