Notes

Artist's Bio

Andries Gouws studied art in Cape Town (Michaelis), Du¨sseldorf (Staatliche Kunstakademie) and Amsterdam (Rijksakademie), and then Philosophy (MA and PhD) in Utrecht (Netherlands). Before becoming a full-time artist, he taught philosophy, and at times art theory and history of art, at levels ranging from first year to PhD. A few of the topics he has published on are El Greco, Lucian Freud, postmodernism and psychoanalysis. His own painting often takes interiors, still life studies and
feet as subject matter. Public collections featuring his work include the Iziko National Museum, Cape Town, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Pretoria Art Museum, and the Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein.

Artist's Statement

Why do I paint the way I do? Why all these rooms without people, these mirrors, these feet? What do my paintings mean?

I don’t know.
I am deeply aware that there is no verbal equivalent for what happens visually in a painting. Besides, the artist’s own words carry no special authority.
So – take any artist’s statement, including this one, with a pinch of salt – something speculative and tentative. The silence or muteness I aim for in my paintings would be lost if they suggested a meaning expressible in words. The meditative impulse – striving to linger in the here and now – is important to me. My paintings seem to oscillate between the meditative and the abject – both phenomena to which the word ‘unspeakable’ is applicable). This sense of the abject perhaps explains why viewers often find them awkward, uncanny or even desolate. Art is unavoidably made in a dialogue with other artists. My paintings are a modest salute to painters like Vermeer, Piero, Morandi, Arikha, and how they capture light, space and stillness. I admire artists like Goya, Guston and Kentridge, who engage with political problems and horrors. But I can’t emulate them – my work comes from a different place. (But perhaps the eruption of the abject in my own work is related to my fascination with Guston and Goya). The varied appearance of my paintings is linked to whether through choice or by necessity, I worked from life or from photographs, more quickly or more slowly. Lastly – the fact that so many poets and novelists are drawn to my work pleases and intrigues me.

Cite´ Experience

The two month stay I had at the Cite´ in September and October 2016 together with my artist- novelist wife Ingrid Winterbach was extremely enjoyable and productive. We managed to spend lots of time taking in art in the stunning museums of Paris with as many hours of making our own art as we would have normally achieved in two months of full-time work in our studios at home. (Most of my paintings made there were of the interior of our studio-apartment, or of the Cite´ laundry; I also made several paintings based on photographs of the same spaces after returning). I thought that the years would have made me too jaded to again feel the infatuation with Paris and the Parisians of my youth, but no – it just returned in full force, when walking along the Seine, buying food at the market (or even the supermarket), and inflicting my French on the locals.