In Her Own Myth, Kate Gottgens uses everyday photographs and reassembles them into dreamlike landscapes, where figures appear almost spectral, as if they belong partly to the world we know and partly to one we are still remembering.
The works move between moments of beauty and something more uncertain: domestic scenes that feel familiar, though never entirely settled. In Gottgens’ paintings, women inhabit landscapes shaped by poetry, folklore and the visual language of Japanese woodblock prints.
The result is a world that feels both intimate and quietly otherworldly.
Currently on view at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until 30 May 2026.
Goodman Gallery presents Kate Gottgens’ ‘Her own myth’, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. The show comes ahead of Gottgens solo exhibition at Norval Foundation in September 2026.
Her Own Myth presents a new body of work by South African artist Kate Gottgens, bringing together multi-scaled oil paintings and monoprints that explore the psychological terrain of memory, mythology and collective imagination.
Central to Gottgens’ practice is the use of found photographs sourced from everyday life. Figures and fragments are extracted from these images and reassembled into newly constructed environments. By dislocating elements from their original suburban contexts, Gottgens produces compositions that feel both familiar and estranged. The resulting scenes resist nostalgia, instead opening space for reflection on shared cultural memory. Within these works, moments of quiet beauty coexist with subtle unease, suggesting domestic spaces that harbour more ambiguous emotional undercurrents.
Over time, Gottgens’ paintings have increasingly featured translucent, spectral figures. These ephemeral presences appear to occupy multiple planes simultaneously, giving the works a shifting temporal quality. In Her Own Myth, such figures inhabit landscapes shaped by references to fairy tales, mythology, poetry, cinema and the visual language of Japanese woodblock ukiyo-e prints.
The exhibition draws conceptual inspiration from several literary sources. The work of poet and artist William Blake, who treated the spiritual and material worlds as inseparable, informs the exhibition’s layered realities. Contemporary writer Madeline Miller and novelist Angela Carter provide further reference points through their reinterpretations of myth and folklore from the perspective of complex female protagonists. Gottgens channels these influences into a cast of liminal figures that oscillate between the real and the imagined, characters that embody both creation and destruction while occupying self-made mythologies.
The visual influence of Japanese woodblock prints appears strongly in works such as The Source (2025) and To Dream a River (2025), where horizons dissolve into atmospheric gradients and landscapes take on dreamlike qualities. Gottgens’ layered painting process begins with saturated colour that gradually deepens or softens through successive applications of paint. In some works, including Furies, Summer, Sister, Seraph and Between Worlds, vivid colour remains dominant, while others, such as A Room in a Bag of Stars, shift toward muted earth tones.
Alongside the paintings, the exhibition includes monoprints created after the completion of the canvases. These works distil the imagery and themes of the paintings into lighter, sketch-like compositions, offering a more immediate and provisional counterpart to the layered intensity of the oil works.
Born in Durban in 1965, Gottgens is known for psychologically charged paintings that move between figuration and abstraction. Her work frequently examines the subconscious dimensions of memory, repression and desire, creating atmospheric images that feel both visually seductive and quietly unsettling.
Gottgens has exhibited widely in South Africa and internationally and has been recognised with the Ampersand Fellowship, which supported a residency in New York in 2019. She lives and works in Cape Town.
Information and images are courtesy of Goodman gallery and the artist
