Kate Gottgens dissects a notably SA type of middle-class whiteness in latest artworks

Previous scenes of nightlife and suburban parties in Cape Town-based artist Kate Gottgens work are distilled in this collection to the trope of the suburban swimming pool. François Ozon’s film Swimming Pool (2003) is perhaps a touchstone for the body of work, a murder thriller in which a complex network of erotic and psychological entanglements between a younger and an older woman takes place at the garden pool, which is the film’s symbolic and narrative centre.

While suggestions of murder lie farther from the surface of Gottgens’s work, a sinister and unclarified sense of erotic charge fills many of the works here. This is aided in no small part by the artist’s signature unresolved and deliberately unfinished effects in her brushwork. The lack of definite detail and any hint of vivid colour in most of her figures and tableaux creates a kind of soulless quality, a set of zombified characters in a disturbingly recognisable set of suburban middle-class scenarios.

Where such resolution in representation is applied to her cast of characters, like the woman lounging beside the pool in The Deep End, she is rendered as a woman out of time, from the pages of a 1950s edition of Life magazine perhaps. Her pin-up beauty and anachronistic appearance accentuates the strangeness of the boy in the pool beside her in the picture plane, who looms like an alien from Area 51, his face mask turned into a space helmet.

Elsewhere the slight skewing of perspective, the defamiliarisation experienced in viewing scenes, which should have a familiar ring for most white South Africans, is accomplished by an uneasy and subtle eroticisation. In The Au Pair, the defaced rendering of the titular character, reclining in a poolside lounger in her bikini, her legs akimbo, presents an insouciant and oblivious sexuality to the viewer — in full view also of the spectral child, presumably the one in her care, hula-hooping at her side. 

Even, or perhaps especially, when no human characters feature at all, as in the monotypes The Abandoned and Empty Pool, a sense of almost Ballardian foreboding looms over the scenes. Gottgens’s carefully uncareful sense of line and colour in these works are washing out of scenes that speaks of a time past, of a quiet desolation.

This mastery of mood and atmosphere is as accomplished in Gottgens’s work as it is in the lyrics of one of her soul-sisters, Lana Del Rey. Her evocations of the US West Coast versions of louche and cynical, yet sun-kissed poolside debutantes chimes exactly with the kind of almost-obsolete, out-of-time lifestyle emblematised by these garden pools and poolside revellers painted so subtly by Gottgens. Her allegory is clear — affectionate, yet undeniably stark and critical of a lifestyle once defined by race and privilege, and now belonging to a bygone era.  

See her work at SMAC Gallery, Parkhurst. Available until the end January.