Notes

Produced specifically for the travelling exhibition iALPTRAUM! conceived by Berlin based artist Marcus Sendlinger and Jay Stuckey from Los Angeles, Hässliche Frau is a rare oil on paper by Georgina Gratrix that emphasizes the tactile quality of the impasto surface that has come to be the artist's inimitable signature.

Responding to the theme of iALPTRAUM!, the German word for nightmare, Gratrix produced this haunting painting which is a portrait of the artist's late grandmother who emigrated from Germany in the 1950s. In this otherwise dark rendition, a startling amount of colour is revealed through the nuanced brushwork of Gratrix’s painterly mark, with the sheen and texture of the surface providing an inner corporality to this depiction of a nightmare.

¡ALPTRAUM! [Travelling Exhibition], Transformer, Washington D.C, USA; Cell Project Space, London, UK; Deutscher Kuenstlerbund, Berlin, Germany; The Company, Los Angeles, USA; Blank projects, Cape Town, South Africa; Green Papaya Art Project & Telenobela, Manila, Philippines.

Provenance

SMAC Art Gallery, Stellenbosch.

Scheryn Art Collection.

Exhibited

Blank Projects, Cape Town, iALPTRAUM!  , 4 August to 3 Spetember, 2011

SMAC Art Gallery, Stellenbosch, Georgina Gratrix: My Show, 29 March to 24 May, 2012