Norval Foundation proudly to presented The Reunion: Georgina Gratrix, the South African artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum. Curated by Guest Curator Liese van der Watt, The Reunion brought together 25 major artworks by Gratrix, completed between 2011 and 2020, and drew upon the holdings of the Homestead Collection, based at Norval Foundation, as well as loans from private lenders. 

Georgina Gratrix (born Mexico, 1982) is known for paintings that feature expressive, impasto brushwork and humorous yet uncomfortable distortions of figures, objects and landscapes filtered through a colour saturated aesthetic. For over a decade Gratrix has investigated how the painted image can both seduce and challenge a viewer, while developing an immediately recognisable visual language that has a broad public appeal. Portraits of family and friends, as well as artworld insiders and popular culture icons, appear alongside oversized still life paintings of impossibly exuberant bouquets and, to a lesser extent, verdant landscapes recalling the province of KwaZulu-Natal, where the artist grew up. 

The Reunion, responded to loose themes within the artist’s practice and was divided into three parts. The first section displayed Gratrix’s portraits of social figures based on images pilfered from social media platforms, newspapers, popular television series, films and society magazines. Through Gratrix’s eyes these figures become almost archetypal and include paintings such as CEO (2014), a generic portrait of a white, male business leader, and The Appraisers (2018), a group portrait referring to the South African art industry. The next section contrasted these archetypal figures with portraits of the artist’s family, friends and self-portraits, conveying, through densely layered paint and unusual manipulations of the human body, something beyond the verisimilitude of the sitter. In The History of Dad (2011) Gratrix depicts a broad and ruddy stubble face with vaguely recognisable features, yet he is obscured by multiple eyes and surfaces. The bow in his hair—a recurring motif that Gratrix often uses in self-portraits—very literally imprints the artist into her father’s history and personifies the density of family relations. Also included is Nine Weeks (2020)—a series of watercolour self-portraits made by the artist, one each day, over the first 63 days of the government-mandated lock-down in South Africa due to the Covid-19 pandemic—in which the artist charts her changing mental states during this period of collective isolation. The Reunion (2020), the group portrait which lends its title to the exhibition, is somewhere in-between, functioning as a bridge between these two sections. It brings together members of Gratrix’s British family, such as her aunt Mavis and her police sergeant grandfather Cecil Gratrix with various characters from British popular culture, including TV stars Father Dougal McGuire from Father Ted and Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby from Midsomer Murders. In its casual intermingling of family and popular personalities, this depiction of an imagined reunion simultaneously reflects a ‘portrait’ of the artist back at us, speaking of anglicised histories that are maintained through family ties. 

The third and final section of the exhibition brings together a selection of Gratrix’s still life paintings. Imaginative and exotic, they are paintings of the heart, filled with flowers and birds, reminiscent of the tropical vegetation of Durban where the artist spent her childhood. Often massive in scale, as in All the Birthdays Bouquet (2016), which is 2.44 metres tall and 4 metres wide, Gratrix’s still lifes are iconoclastic in the sense that the genre is characterised by far more modest dimensions. These paintings oppose the intimacy and searching scrutiny that we find in Gratrix’s portraits, as they are clearly not ‘about’ anything in the narrative sense of the word, yet speak loudly about the artist’s commitment to the medium, her singular eye and the joy of painting that she gifts to her viewers. 

Norval Foundation is delighted to have collaborated with Guest Curator Dr. Liese van der Watt on The Reunion. Van der Watt’s understanding of South African art history is complimented by an awareness of global developments in the discipline, making her ideally positioned to reflect critically on Gratrix’s practice. Van der Watt taught art history at the University of Cape Town before moving to London, UK in 2007. She has published widely on contemporary art from Africa in peer reviewed journals and books, visual art publications and online forums. This collaboration reaffirms Norval Foundation’s aim to be a platform where cultural practitioners with different understandings and backgrounds can interpret the cultural practices of the present and recent past. 

The Reunion was accompanied by a catalogue edited by Chief Curator Owen Martin and Curator Khanya Mashabela, with a text by Van der Watt and an interview with the artist by Mashabela. The Reunion appeared alongside Alt and Omega: Jackson Hlungwani and iiNyanga Zonyaka: Athi-Patra Ruga.