Walking into Gabrielle Kruger’s sun-drenched studio in Woodstock, Cape Town, you notice the light first — streaming through steel-framed windows, flooding the space with warmth. Then the buckets: some encrusted with thick layers of paint, and some displaying giant flowers that look as if they’ve stepped out from the pages of a storybook.
The studio is clearly Gabrielle’s “happy space”. Large paintings adorn the walls; bookshelves overflow with art books and strips of paint hang like colourful shoelaces placed in sunny spots to dry.
“I don’t throw anything down the drain,” Gabrielle says. “I don’t wash the buckets. I let the paint dry and then peel it off afterwards.”
For nine years, she’s collected these paint fragments, storing them in her father’s old wooden architecture drawers, using them to make new paints out of old.
“This idea of change or fluidity — of something becoming something else or growing into something else — is also the idea that the paintings are always in conversation with each other,” says Gabrielle.
Ungrounding the landscape
She’s been refining her technique of reusing paint since a pivotal moment during her master’s degree at Michaelis School of Art (UCT). Working with marbled paint pellets that she’d attach to paintings, her supervisor, well-known South African artist Penny Siopis, made an observation that changed everything.
“She said, ‘It’s like the paint is begging to fall off the canvas,’” Kruger recalls. “That made me realise, ‘Well, what if it did come off? What if a painting just existed without a canvas?”
That revelation led to her master’s thesis on “ungrounding the landscape”, in which she completely deconstructed the tradition of painting by allowing the viewer to walk through the physical paint layers — large sheets of acrylic interweaving and mimicking foliage from the landscape.
The technical realities of her vision sent Kruger on a scientific journey. She discovered that oil paint dried too slowly, acrylic peeled poorly from Perspex, and house paint became brittle.
“My thesis became a bit scientific by accident,” she says. Over two years, she worked with a paint supplier to develop her own formula — now delivered in large buckets that she pigments herself using a power drill and hand mixer.
Paint as performance
Her work took a performative turn in 2019 when she created wearable pieces for an African rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Nirox Foundation, performed by National School of the Arts students.
“Seeing my work moving like that was such an incredible moment,” she remembers.
Gabrielle went on to create two more performance paintings that year: Arte Botanica at Nirox, followed by a Gucci-themed "Garden of Eden" featuring Cape Town City Ballet students at the Norval Foundation.
She is currently working on an experimental, experiential showcase combining an installation work and a performance.
An artist between two worlds
Kruger’s roots run deep in Cape Town. She grew up in Oranjezicht in a family of artists, influenced by her textile designer mother and architect-painter-poet father, who both encouraged her creativity from childhood. But recent years have seen her split her life between two cities. Her relationship with Berlin began before the pandemic, when representatives from Galerie EIGEN + ART, a renowned Berlin gallery, visited her studio in 2019.
She spent a few months a year living in Berlin and has started building a community there. In 2024, she produced her solo exhibition wind swept paint at Galerie EIGEN + ART Lab — a meditation on the changing of the seasons.
“I love having feet in both cities,” Kruger reflects. “I love Berlin — it’s this multifaceted city where every neighbourhood feels like a different part of Europe. People are just unapologetically themselves.”
No place like home
Yet Cape Town always calls her back.
“The natural environment — landscapes, gardens, plants — have always been my main source of inspiration,” she says.
Last year she showcased her work, Blurred Edges, at The Silo Hotel’s Vault gallery in Cape Town, curated by Brundyn Arts & Culture, and in October 2025, her latest work — Only Ever This Nesting Place — was installed as part of the Stellenbosch Art Mile. It marks a significant milestone: her first permanent outdoor sculpture.
The installation features nest-like forms constructed from eight years of accumulated paint waste, balanced on steel structures reminiscent of bare winter trees.
What began as an idea about “paint agglomerate, fossil-type things” evolved during the creative process. “As I started making them, they looked like nests, so I wanted to keep them organic,” she says. “While working on this piece, it was a walk down memory lane for me, recognising remnants and pieces of past works. Each layer contains memory and meaning.”
Now placed along the Eerste River, the work “symbolises the interconnectedness of ecological, material and artificial worlds”, inviting “new forms of life to take root within its layered surfaces”.
“This idea of becoming, or something becoming something else, is a very big part of my work: change, movement, and the performative aspect of painting,” she explains. “The wet paint serves as glue, while dried paint becomes collage material — nothing is wasted; everything transforms.”
When the steel sculpture was first installed, birds immediately came to perch on it, a clear affirmation of Gabrielle’s intention to honour the natural world through her work and her art.
