Katharien de Villiers South Africa, b. 1991

Katharien de Villiers (b. 1991, Cape Town) concluded an MFA in Installation in 2015 in the KASK School of Arts Gent (Belgium). Through her works - including paintings, sculptures, and installations - she explores and questions the spatial and relational dynamics between the space, the artwork, and the viewer. Her paintings are layered and talkative. Arenas of color give dimension to a body of work that often projects into the gallery space, entrusting the ordinary with authority and evincing a romance with the mundane. Through tactile manipulations involving the juxtaposition and de-contextualization of material, de Villiers calls on the viewer's sensory, mental, physical potential and participation when confronted with her work. Thus, depending on the inherent power of the given form and inclination of the beholder to be informed or moved, the voluntary encounter evolves into a symbiosis of original and inspired reality.

As stated by Katharien: “When you are confronted with an image, you do not send out aggressive rays of sight but let the picture work on you. And that’s like experiencing. We must all create our own meaning through experience.” The layers of her work also represent the “patina of time,” as well as a surreal symbolism, Afrikaans onomatopoeia, and collages constructed from hybrid memories. To this, the artists said: “I remember the engineer’s table my father worked at, covered in koki and pencil lines, a layering of possible trajectories which accumulated over time.”

Available Works