Cape Town

STEVENSON is pleased to present Love like a sunset, a summer playlist, a solo exhibition by Georgina Gratrix.

For her first solo exhibition in the Cape Town gallery, Gratrix presents a series of still lifes and portraits that foreground how her studio acts as a temple and home, hosting the sanctified and the everyday, mediating her relationships with people, objects and painting itself.

Timeless Bounty (the collection of Sue Clark) and Night Studio (Staffordshire’s Lament), the key works in this exhibition, echo The Green Studio, a painting central to her previous show. Where the latter acted as a love letter to Durban, her new works celebrate the objects, ideas and relationships that - often unseen - provide the foundation for her work.

These paintings plainly evidence the influence of Henri Matisse on Gratrix’s treatment of perspective and form. More subtly, it is his relationship with objects that resonates for the artist. In Matisse in the Studio, a volume that’s a mainstay of Gratrix’s working space, Claudine Grammont writes, ‘It is the presence of the object that triggers the work of the unconscious and enables the artist to slip into what he sometimes calls his garden.’ In Timeless Bounty, she pays homage to a friend’s collection of objects and flower arrangements, all of which have formed an aesthetic context for Gratrix through a relationship spanning decades. More introspectively, the artist’s nocturnal translation of her environment features bottles of dishwashing liquid, vases by Hylton Nel and Staffordshire figurines, offering a tribute to the objects and creations that are her companions within it. She remarks:

It’s about the sanctity and the solace of the space. This is where I spend my whole life so I’m paying a kind of homage to the studio, the life of the studio - it’s about making. There are cigarette butts on the floor and vases and Sunlight liquid because I use so much of it for cleaning my brushes. I love the challenge of using very ordinary things to express a complicated sensation; painting can be an armature for feelings - it’s always a relation. I think paintings always relate to the last painting you made; it’s always the continuation of a conversation.

Gratrix’s newest bird painting, which bears the title of the show, focuses on the complexities of relation and intimacy. The boisterous flock in Summer playlist (a lover’s discourse) is accompanied by the titles of love songs that span euphoria and heartache. The artist continues:

It’s sort of a soundtrack [to what was happening in studio] – I was listening to these as I was making the work, deciding what will come in and go out. There’s something nice about associating a somewhat literal landscape to a sonic landscape. It’s an excuse to paint birds, but then it’s also a playlist. Who doesn’t like making a playlist? So much about how we live now is about curating, cultivating and making collections of things. I love the idea of paintings that can exist as something else, something that you can take with you, that anyone can listen to.

Bloomsbury Bouquet, her largest painting to date, is a result of turning more of her home into an extension of the studio. Here, the floral arrangement dwarfs her illustrated dogs, and petals erupt from glittery pistils. Gratrix celebrates the act of making, her application of paint both feverish and controlled. She continues, ‘there’s something very satisfying in taking a tiny sketch and seeing how far you can blow it up, really utilising the space. There’s something quite nice about seeing a red flower the size of your head.’

The exhibition opens Saturday 15 February, 10am to 1pm