Georgina Gratrix
Painting has a very long and exhaustive history, embodying in every brushstroke the weight of eons of deadly serious practice and discourses. For the last century or so, this history can be traced in the many deaths that the medium has been victim to; with theorists, critics and artists definitively proclaiming the death of painting at various points throughout its trajectory. From French history painter Paul Delaroche lamenting the birth of photography as synonymous with painting’s non-existence in the mid 1800s through to Malevich’s 1918 White on White flattening representation to death, to conceptualism’s apparent total disregard for the medium, painting has been murdered with tedious regularity.
Of course, while painting has been (until recently) spurned by the art elite, apparently no one ever informed the general public of its demise, with people the world over making, loving and hanging the rotting medium over their mantelpieces with the fervor of a necrophile. Indeed, though painting has long been forced to take a defensive position within the art elite, for the rest of the world “painting” is still what one means when using the word “art”. This particular duality is nowhere more present than within the Cape Town art microcosm, where a boys’ club of clever conceptualists exist hand in hand with a public that remains almost entirely uneducated regarding painting’s alternatives.
Thus, unlike the Sunday Painter who remains oblivious to painting’s derision amongst ‘real artists’ (read, often, Sunday Conceptualists) while merrily rendering flowers and nail polish abstracts, the contemporary artist who paints has been forced into a corner where they are constantly fighting against both painting’s revered position within the popular imagination and its subsequent irrelevance to contemporary practice, hindered always by its complex elitist history. In Master Copy, however, Georgina Gratrix comes out fighting: Unapologetically a painter, a women and a thinking artist, she is bringing painting, in all its manifestations, back to life.
Excerpt from Return of the Undead
The catalogue essay for Georgina Gratrix’s debut solo exhibition Master Copy
By Linda Stupart
