GEORGINA GRATRIX

Georgina Gratrix’s works explore the notions of fame, identity, and popular culture while making explicit references to art history. Her practice pushes the boundaries of contemporary painting through sharp humour, personal narratives, and aesthetic irony. Employing thick impasto and expressionist brushstrokes, Gratrix combines colour, shape, and recurring symbols to create almost sculptural surfaces. Her exaggerated, seemingly childlike portraits and still lifes are constructed from richly textured layers of paint, which, in turn, expose the complex, multilayerednature of the human individual. Scribbles, personal photographs, local cultural references, internet compilations, and fragments of daily life all find their way into the artist’s visual vocabulary. Treating the entire history of painting as a space for dialogue, her works converse with modernism – particularly German Expressionism – while deploying parody and the grotesque as tools to challenge conventional definitions of beauty. As Gratrix observes: ‘What makes contemporary painting especially interesting for me is a revisionist, humorous approach that excavates historical representations and mocks them.’