MARUANI MERCIER is proud to current Darkening Nightfall, the inaugural solo exhibition of South African artist Kate Gottgens, at their Knokke gallery. Acknowledged for her haunting, dreamlike compositions, Gottgens crafts works that exist in a state of liminality—by no means fastened, at all times in flux, and at occasions elusive. Simply because the fading gentle of nightfall blurs the boundaries of day and night time, her work evoke a way of transition, the place familiarity dissolves into one thing extra fluid, open-ended, and mysterious.
Gottgens builds her work from a wide range of sourced imagery—nameless snapshots discovered at flea markets, household trip images, or fragments retrieved from the huge digital archive of the web. Stripped of their unique contexts, these pictures develop into the uncooked materials for a means of reconstruction and transformation. This provides rise to landscapes that really feel each intimate and unplaceable, imbued with an unsettling, cinematic pressure. On this physique of labor, nature serves as each topic and entry level. The figures in her work seem to enter nature as a lot as nature enters them, dissolving the boundaries between physique and atmosphere. Water emerges as a recurring motif, not as a passive aspect however as a charged, transitional area. Swimming pools replicate unnatural hues—electrical blues and eerie greens—that disrupt the pure setting, producing a refined but palpable pressure. By means of this interaction, Gottgens explores the seductive but misleading nature of nostalgia. The pull of nostalgia could be dangerously alluring, smoothing over complexities and reworking historical past right into a sentimentalized phantasm. This, what she refers to because the “chocolate-box cliché,” is subtly punctured in her work, as she exposes the underbelly of those idealized reminiscences of the previous.
