oil on canvas

Artwork date: 2011
Signature details: signed , dated and printed with the artist's name, the date, title, medium and dimensions on a SMAC Gallery label on the reverse
Exhibited: The Plot Gallery, Online, 'This Stays Between Me and You', 9 December 2021 to 13 February 2022.; SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, 'My Show', 29 March to 24 May 2012.; FNB Joburg Art Fair, Johannesburg, SMAC Gallery, 23 to 25 September 2011
Literature: Van Zyl, M. (ed). (2016). GEORGINA GRATRIX. Stellenbosch: SMAC Art Publishing, illustrated in colour on p.179.; 'My Show'. (2012). [Exhibition Catalogue]. SMAC Gallery: Cape Town. 29 March to 24 May 2012.

(1)

120 x 100 cm; framed size: 123.5 x 103 x 6.5 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Cape Town.

SMAC Gallery, Stellenbosch..

ABOUT THE ARTWORK:

“In our 21st century rabbit hole, Georgina Gratrix has been carefully cultivating a system of painterly hieroglyphics that incorporates the uncanny, grotesque humour and blithe tropical aesthetics”[1] writes art historian Emily Friedman, referencing the ‘peculiar’ visual language rendered in the artist’s thickly layered paintings.

Portraiture remains a favoured genre for Gratrix with subjects drawn from her personal and social world, as well as contemporary pop and celebrity culture. Painted in 2011, as part of a large body of work for her debut solo exhibition My Show in 2012, the formidable Mr Nice Guy presents an early introduction to the particular witticisms of Gratrix. A seemingly charismatic dandy, portrayed in cool colours, loose tie and open collar, with his face obscured by another layering of facial features – one sees a double set of eyes and a crown of blonde hair – in thick impasto strokes. This mysterious man, often speculated to be a former romantic interest of the artist, coveys some sort of an illogical ideal. “Like the wandering flâneur of existential literary tradition, he demonstrates multiplicity and anonymity of the self. He is every-man and no-man”.[2] Gratrix’s Mr Nice Guy is “about the ‘idea’ of a type of person or personality”[3] – a kaleidoscope that echoes a piquant sense of (visual) humour, which is communicated through fragmentation and formal simplicity.

Friedman notes that “while varied in execution, each of Gratrix’s portraits has an underlying aesthetic in common, which is at once familiar and alien, humorous and unsettling, visually pleasing and yet slightly disturbed. The result is a sardonic style that subverts the historical painterly language”.[4]

Text by Marelize van Zyl

COLLECTOR'S NOTE:

In 2022, Georgina Gratrix presented a solo exhibition; The Cult of Ugliness at The Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town, and in 2021, the Norval Foundation in Cape Town hosted a major solo exhibition and released a publication titled Georgina Gratrix: The Reunion.

Notable recent group exhibitions include; Would you still love me if I painted parrots all day? at Dirimart in Istanbul, Turkey; Inner Landscapes at Bloom Galerie in Geneva, Switzerland and Fifty Sounds at Galerie Kiche in Seoul, Korea.

[1] Friedman, E. (2016). Clowning Wisely. The Portrait Paintings of Georgina Gratrix, in Van Zyl, M (ed.) Van Zyl, M. (ed). (2016). GEORGINA GRATRIX. Stellenbosch: SMAC Art Publishing, p.19.

[2] Ibid. p.20.

[3] Ibid. p.20.

[4] Ibid. p.21.

COLLECTIONS:

The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, Collection Leridon, Paris; the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; the Missoni Collection, Milan; the Ellerman House Collection, Cape Town and the Spier Art Collection, Stellenbosch.