Bromide Beach ,2016
Provenance : Private collection, Cape Town.
SMAC Gallery, Johannesburg.
Exhibited : SMAC Gallery, Johannesburg, 'Kate Gottgens: Famine', 10 September to 6 October 2016.
Literature : Flaery, P. and O’Toole, S. (2017). ‘Kate Gottgens. Paintings 2015 – 2017’. Cape Town: SMAC Gallery. illustrated in colour on pp.64-65.; VISI (online), ‘Artists We Love: Kate Gottgens’, written by Michaela Stehr, 28 October 2016. [Available at: https://visi.co.za/artists-we-love-kate-gottgens/]; Between10&5 (online), ‘Are You Scared Of This Too? Kate Gottgens’ New Show Famine’, written by Layla Leiman, 26 September 2016. [Available at: https://10and5.com/2016/09/26/are-you-scared-of-this-too-kate-gottgens-new-show-famine/; Adjective (online), ‘Hunger Artist – Kate Gottgens’, written by Ashraf Jamal, 21 September 2016. [Available at: http://www.adjective.online/2016/09/21/hunger-artist-ashraf-jamal/]
Notes : At first sight, one is transfixed by the luminous cinematic poolside scene presented large scale in Bromide Beach (2016). Hazily dreamlike, the setting is all too familiar – too perfect, and so seductively alluring. Palm trees, sun loungers and young people lazing around in a perfectly constructed tropical oasis. Stunningly and loosely rendered in diluted, polychromatic cool colours, the mood is one of idle leisure and feigned nonchalance – yet, there seems to be a palpable sense of disquiet.
Bromide Beach was first exhibited in Kate Gottgens’ solo exhibition Famine in Johannesburg in 2016. Conceptually, the body of work focussed on the new, millennial Generation Y’s coming of age, “in an affluent but changeable world filled to bursting with real and psychic hunger and emptiness”.[1]
For this series, Gottgens worked from her personal photographic archive while also drawing on her own memories and experiences as well as observing those of her millennial children as they enter adulthood. Voyeurism and autobiography are entwined, and for Gottgens, it is the idea of “alienated youth on the brink of supposed freedom, with its potential for collapse”.[2]
Herein lies the thematic mastery of Gottgens’ paintings such as the enigmatic Bromide Beach. A picturesque cliché depicted ironically, the work maintains a sense of mystery and an open-ended quality in finding its meaning. Is the artwork a comment on the beautiful banality of the empty pleasures we seek, or a remark on the unpredictability and fragility of life as we know it?
Marelize van Zyl
[1] Between10&5 (online), Are You Scared Of This Too? Kate Gottgens New Show Famine, written by Layla Leiman, 26 September 2016. [Available at: https://10and5.com/2016/09/26/are-you-scared-of-this-too-kate-gottgens-new-show-famine/
[2] Ibid.
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