ARTIST BIO, STATEMENT & CV. 

Gabrielle Raaff (b. 1970) is a painter who lives and works in Lakeside, Cape Town.
She has exhibited extensively in South Africa and abroad.
Raaff's works begin with a photographic image, and while this image serves as a jumping-off point only, we are repeatedly brought back to the photographic process. The medium of photography, and its ability to fix an image is what piques her interest. The artist works with ethereality. She uses the media of ink, water- colour and water-based oil as a vehicle for alluding to the form and emotional nature of her subject. The figure and landscape and its reference both to actual place

and places of the subconscious are what can be found lurking in her paintings. Raaff's most notable earlier works in water- colour and ink capturing beach and city figures and aerial Google satellite images of distinctly different South African neighbourhoods, rely on a cool relationship between herself and the subject and revel in the abstract qualities of the view.
Recent works have seen a return to a more visceral use of water-based oil to help play out a more intimate, painterly relationship with the subject.

Artist Statements
“I like to explore the properties, possibilities and wilfulness of diluted pigment.
My recent works hold within them visual clues and reflect the lives of ordinary people and places around me. There is a tug that plays out between abstraction and figuration, clarity and mystery. I have had an affiliation with watery media for many years now, sometimes exploring the properties of ink, water colour and water-soluble oil through the genre of familiar landscape and sometimes figuration. I play with using my materials the way I usually would on paper, enjoying the thrill of making a mark and seeing where it may lead. A new narrative is intimated through a sort of intuitive wrestling with subject and mark making on the surface, implying just enough for the viewer to interpret what they see and therefore take the story to their own conclusion. I like to create new landscapes where contradictions can co-exist.”
“My process of painting echoes the way I live in the world, calling for appropriate responses to different situations,requiring particular strengths and intuitions to help direct flow and development.
Each painting requires that I take certain steps to add to, change or remove the marks made before.

This very intuitive process sometimes calls for a light hearted detachment and sometimes sheer courage but there is a trust that the painting has a life of its own and works itself out in the end.”

CV
Born 1970
BAFA (HDE) from the University of Stellenbosch 1992
SOLO SHOWS: As You Were, 131a Gallery, Cape Town (2022), Echoes from the South, SMITH gallery, Cape Town (2019), Trail, SMITH Gallery, Cape Town, (2017), Night Watch, Salon 91, Cape Town, (2015)
In Our Midst, Muti Gallery, Cape Town (2009) and Recent Paintings, AVA Gallery, Cape Town, (1995),
NOTABLE GROUP SHOWS: Optimal Vibration, Graham Contemprary, Johannesburg (2023), Borrel, Woordfees, Stellenbosch, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Cavalli Gallery, Somerset West, Hot Spell, 99 Loop Gallery, Cape Town (2023), Painter Painter, Barnard Gallery, Cape Town (2022)
Code, 131agallery, Cape Town (2021), Emphatic Whispers, SMITH, Cape Town (2019)
However, Arthub Gallery, London (2015), Empire, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town (2015), Scintilla: An Alchemy Show at Commune 1, Cape Town (2014), People with Tom Cullberg, Chagan Contemporary, London, (2011), Unplugged initiated by Kendall Geers Rembrandt Van Rijn Gallery, Market Theatre, Johannesburg, (1998)
ART FAIRS: Rotterdam Art Fair (2014) Turbine Art Fair in Johannesburg (2014 and 2015), Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2013, 2018) and at various affordable art fairs in Paris, New York, and London represented by Uprise Art, New York
COLLECTIONS: British Airways, Bennetton, Nandos, UCT - Irma Stern Museum Collection UCT - New Finance Department

PUBLICATIONS: Whispers From the White Space by Gabrielle Raaff. Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, published 2017 Benetton Small Canvasses, published 2014
Vacated Spaces - Contemporary South African Water colour, Virginia MacKenny Art South Africa, Volume 09, Issue 04,
Winter 2011 “Cultures Collide”, Natalie Bosman, The Citizen. 7/08 Spier Contemporary, Review for Visi Magazine, 2007