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Gitte Möller (b. Cape Town, 1991) received her BA in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2015, and was awarded the Judy Steinberg painting prize for her graduate show. Möller uses a range of different mediums and painterly devices to explore the symbolic and numinous possibilities of art making. Drawing from ancient mythology, manuscripts and prayer paintings to motivational images and functional graphics, Möller’s works holds a complex array of signs, symbols and archetypes in suspension. Through a solitary game of exquisite corpse, fragments of discarded and disregarded aesthetics are rehabilitated by way of exaggerated symbolism to give expression to issues concerning the soul, femininity and fear. These are connected both positively and negatively to her own social and domestic context. As a whole, Möller’s work is enshrined in pseudo veneration: a half- hearted defence mechanism that responds to the anxieties of a dual consciousness. There is the feeling of hypnosis gone wrong - of the mind being fully aware of the body’s betrayal and having to reconcile this experience into a single representation (now and again failing or succeeding). In this complex visual space she offers a distracted meditation on a world interpolated by empathy and apathy, freedom and vulnerability and the struggle between good and evil.
Solo exhibitions
2018 Ugly Girl Hand Cream, SMITH, Cape Town
Group exhibitions
2018 Rendezvous, SMITH, Cape Town
2018 Close Encounters, SMITH, Cape Town
2018 To each its own, Eclectica Print, Cape Town
2017 Salad, SMITH, Cape Town
2017 Folly, SMITH, Cape Town
2017 Array 0.1, The Taj Gallery, Cape Town.
2017 Group Show, No End Contemporary Johannesburg
2017 Nano 2, Barnard Gallery, Cape Town
2017 Out of Nowhere, SMITH, Cape Town
2017 Michaelis Silent Auction, SMITH, Cape Town
2016 Zine exhibit with Alma Martha, Ineverread Book Fair, Basel, Switzerland
2016 Embrace Tiger and Return to Mountain, Alma Martha site specific group show, Central Methodist Church, Cape Town
2016 Liminal Geographies, Barnard Gallery, Cape Town
2016 Series/friends, Worldart Gallery, Cape Town
2016 Unpacking, Eclectica Print Room, Cape Town
2016 Nano 1, Barnard Gallery, Cape Town
2016 Alma Martha Group Show, On Longmarket, Cape Town
2016 IK one night site-specific show at City Guns, Cape Town
Art Fairs
2018 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, SMITH
2017 Cape Town Art Fair, presented by 50/50 Prints
2017 Johannesburg Art Fair, presented by 50/50 Prints
2017 Turbine Art Fair, presented by 50/50 Prints
2016 Cape Town Art Fair, presented by Barnard Gallery
2017 Solo exhibition at Turbine Art Fair, presented by Barnard Gallery
Prizes
Judy Steinberg Painting Prize at Michaelis School of Fine Art UCT
Media/Publications:
http://artthrob.co.za/2016/11/15/ polysemic-seas-liminal-geographies-at-barnard-gallery/