Georgina Gratrix: The Pleasure is Mine and Georgina Gratrix: Nine Weeks are the South African artist’s first solo exhibitions Stateside.
For Nine Weeks, Gratrix turns the focus onto herself. One work in sixty-three parts, the piece consists entirely of a series of one-completed-daily watercolor self-portraits created during South Africa’s military-enforced quarantine. Implemented as an instagram project as a means of connecting to the outside world—leaving the house, even for a walk was forbidden by law except during state-sanctioned times dictated by the government—the titles of each day’s work on paper offer first-person views of a somewhat universal experience. Taken as a whole, the artist’s portraits are a maddening glimpse at the evolution of identity under quarantine.
Georgina Gratrix (b. 1982, Mexico City, Mexico) grew up in Durban, South Africa. She studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, and graduated in 2005, specializing in painting. She was recently awarded the Discovery Prize at the 50th Anniversary edition of Art Brussels, for her presentation with SMAC Gallery. Gratrix is a recipient of the Ampersand Fellowship Award and completed her residency at the Ampersand Foundation in New York City in 2018.
Recent exhibitions include Recent Acquisitions by the Homestead Collection, Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2020); Hollywood Babylon, Jeffrey Deitch, Nicodim Gallery, and AUTRE Magazine, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Skin Stealers, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); Punch, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, (2019); Everybody loves the sunshine, Plus One Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2018); On Repeat, SMAC Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2017, solo); Puppy Love, SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2016, solo); and Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart, curated by Marilyn Martin, New Church Museum, Cape Town, South Africa (2015).
Georgina Gratrix’s figures and still-lifes have a gloopy impasto paint application. The faces of her figures ride a line between comical and slightly disturbing. Swabs of thick paint fold into disfigured personhood: melting noses, multiple sets of eyes, large textural gashes across cheeks. Some even have googly eyes embedded in the thick paint. Many of the paintings are intimate self-portraits or paintings of loved ones, but unlikely celebrities, politicians, and athletes including Scottie Pippen — appear in the mix.
Going to Nicodim Gallery to see the solo exhibition of South African artist Georgina Gratrix (b. 1982), I didn’t expect to admire and giggle at her heavy impasto paintings, that grabbed my attention with its bursting energy. None of the people the artist chose to portray look attractive or smart, instead they’re caricatures of themselves. They come across as cheeky, playful and surprisingly charming portraits of possibly Georgina Gratrix’s friends and family?!