Young South African Gitte Maria Moller (Cape Town, 1991), bases her artistic process onto the exploration of symbols and archetypes, to express all of those matters that concern the feminine soul and fears. She represents indeed a big part of the duality owned by a mind aware of the body betrayal, offering in her visual spaces a world interpolated by freedom and vulnerability, that is the struggle between good and evil.
The big picture of her final images is made up of a complex of well-chosen details, which are all connected to her own social and domestic context. She says about her work: “I often think of my work as a kind of private parable in which I get to comb through the tensions that exist between difficult and contradictory states of being and feeling. A large part of my aesthetic is drawn from Gothic architecture and painting, where the artistic mode is often aggressively decadent and detailed, corresponding to the hysteric and obsessive religiosity of the time. I find this mode of working calming precisely because it is so neurotic. It is a space in which something can be, in equal measure, pleasant and repulsive, vacuous and meaningful, both regrettable and full of possibility.” And this explanation is exactly what we get from her artworks, a struggle to a happier mankind, or in other words a complex balance of opposites. Her process is slow as she often gets deep into issues concerning religious and ancient matters such as manuscripts, Arabic miniatures, prayers paintings, manga and motivational images, just to mention a few.
Gitte Maria Moller graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2015 and was awarded the Judy Steinberg painting prize for her graduate show.
Since then she participated in several group-shows mostly in her home city and now looks forward to some artist residency.
To know more about her, go here.
