Elize Vossgätter (b.1981, Johannesburg) is a Visual Artist based in Cape Town and Leipzig. The artist’s practice is primarily with oil paint, though she does explore across various media including sculpture, print making and performance. Her painterly explorations are of the human condition. Her first four solo shows within Cape Town have been marked by her consistent drive to ‘force back the limits of the materiality of paint’ and find new techniques with which to show new meaning.
Despite this constant experimentation and renewal of painting as language her sensibility has remained constant: A deep fascination with what it means to be human, and how this constructed humanness exists in relation with our natural environment and with each other. Her work is an imbued interrogation into philosophical and psychological mores questioning group consciousness and accountability.
Painting is an instinctive, observational reaction to the natural patterns of the world
Her latest body of work, Natural Order, sees the surface on canvases once again transformed working with beeswax. The pigments both synthetic and organic are mixed into this natural beeswax. These are then thermically treated and carved into, thus serving for the artist ‘to create a multi-layered relief evoking the physical laws of Nature’ from which she draws her visual vocabulary. For Vossgätter Natural Order poses questions about our current human reevaluation of self within the paradigm of nature and the resultant shift in our sociopolitical constructs.
My work is a painterly interrogation into philosophical and psychological mores questioning group consciousness and accountability.
CAREER
She obtained a BA(FA) from University of Cape Town in 2002.
She has held four solo exhibitions since 2012 and participated in various group exhibitions and art fairs locally and internationally. Her residencies have had an influential affect on her work notably in Istanbul (2013), Art Omi International Arts Centre (NY, USA, 2016) and Pilotenkueche (Leipzig, 2017).
The latter affected her work most notably beginning in a new cycle in her work entitled Natural Order.
Elize Vossgätter is of German descent and was born in Johannesburg, South Africa (1981
The AVA Gallery in Cape Town showed her first two solo exhibitions: Sterntaler – an investigation of privilege and emancipation (2012) as well as Once there was and once there was not (2013) in which she investigated the unnatural relationship between man and nature, a recurring theme in her work going forward.
In 2015, Commune.1 in Cape Town hosted the exhibition In the End we’re all to Blame. This series of work began to address group consciousness and accountability. In 2016, the series The Conservationists’ Dream was created for the Cape Town Art Fair, in association with SMITH, in which she deepened her engagement with ecological issues. In 2017 her solo show at SMITH entitled limp, where she took a critical look at the effects of privilege and entitlement and what role that position plays in the current transformation process of the country.
Since 2017 she has been living in Leipzig to work on a new body of work, Natural Order, where her consistent interest in political and environmental transformation continues to evolve from a more universal counterpoint. Her work has been selected for the Dakar Biennale 2020 and bought by the state of Saxony for their official collection.
She continues to live and work between South Africa, Germany and Austria and stretching her practice over new audiences.
Elize is represented by Everard Read gallery in Cape Town.