Bronwyn Katz, Gõegõe, 2021, on view at The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale
Bronwyn Katz
“Her buoyant compositions appear hung on walls as multi-dimensional paintings, laid across floors like topographical landscapes, and hanging from ceilings or protruding from the ground up like so many stalactites and stalagmites. Katz uses found materials to draw on the physical, emotional, and spiritual history of their making. While she is driven by formal concerns expressed in an abstract, minimal language, her wire works paint evocative and specific stories. Katz’s ongoing use of found mattress springs and other household materials refers to domestic life – specifically the intimate space of the bed, which is often the site for conception, birth, and death. Gõegõe (2021) is a new, large sculpture made from found bedsprings and black pot scourers. Placed on the floor, the six- metre-wide work is named after a mythical water snake that is known by many different names in the mythology of many South African peoples. For Katz, the snake becomes a metaphor for our contemporary extractive relationship with the Earth and other living creatures.”
- Melanie Kress for The Milk of Dreams
Incorporating sculpture, installation, video and performance, Bronwyn Katz’s practice engages with the concept of land as a repository of memory and trauma, reflecting on the notion of place or space as lived experience, and the ability of the land to remember and communicate the memory of its occupation.
Working with found natural materials such as iron ore and river stones, or used manmade objects such as foam mattress and bedsprings, Katz’s approach to making is driven by storytelling and intuition. Conceptually, her sculptures refer to the political context of their making, embodying subtle acts of resistance that draw attention to the social constructions and boundaries that continue to define our environments.
For Katz, the language of abstraction is in active opposition to overt representation, allowing her work to be open to multivalent readings. Hers is a minimalism that converses with early forms of abstract art; methods and traditions of mark-making and story-telling that long predate Western Modernism.
Katz’s work is currently included in The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. In 2021, she participated in Soft Water Hard Stone, the New Museum Triennial of New York and the Future Generation Art Prize shortlist exhibition. The artist has been included in group exhibitions at The Arts Club of Chicago, 2020; Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, 2020; Biennale of Sydney, 2020; Biennale de Lyon, 2019; Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, Marrakech, 2019; Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis, Mauritius, 2018; Kunsthal KAdE, Amersvoort, 2018; Galerie des Galeries, Paris, 2017; and the 12th Dak’Art Biennale, Senegal, 2019. In 2019, she was awarded the First National Bank Art Prize.
More information about the artist can be found here
