Over the past decade, Kate Gottgens has emerged as one of South Africa’s most internationally recognised contemporary artists, with solo exhibitions in Belgium, New York and London. Unsteady Realms, which opens at Norval Foundation’s Gallery 1 on 15 September 2026, marks the first time a museum has dedicated a solo exhibition to her work.
Bringing together new and existing works, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience the full breadth of an artist whose work has become increasingly significant within contemporary South African art.
“To present Kate Gottgens’ first institutional exhibition is a privilege that sits close to the heart of what Norval Foundation exists to do: to give our most significant living artists the sustained, serious attention their work has long deserved. Gottgens is among the most accomplished painters working in South Africa today, and Unsteady Realms offers our audiences the space to encounter the very distinctive reach of her practice: its beauty, its unease, and its quiet insistence on ambiguity,” says Carmen Joubert, Norval Foundation Curator.
Blurring the boundaries between memory and imagination
The much anticipated exhibition will bring together works by Gottgens that blur the boundaries between memory and imagination, where identity is unstable, time is elastic, and the self is understood as layered, relational, and unresolved.
Her figures, which are most often women, occupy spaces that feel both familiar and elusive, inviting viewers to consider how identity is shaped by memory, emotion and lived experience rather than certainty. Rather than offering clear narratives, her paintings create room for reflection, making them resonate in a moment when questions of identity, belonging and representation remain at the forefront of public conversation.
“My figures are multi-faceted and embedded with paradox. More like shards of a personality than bodily, visceral or specific. They are holograms of potential: negative/positive or life-giving/life destroying,” says Gottgens
Drawing on personal photographs, found imagery and fragments of everyday life, Gottgens creates works that are as visually captivating as they are emotionally complex. Her layered surfaces and softened forms evoke the shifting nature of memory, encouraging viewers to embrace ambiguity rather than seek definitive answers.
Unsteady Realms is an invitation to linger in moments that resist easy explanation. Tender and quietly unsettling, the exhibition reveals uncertainty not as something to overcome, but as a space where empathy, imagination and human connection can unfold.
What: Unsteady Realms by Kate Gottgens
Where: Norval Foundation from 15 September 2026
WS
