Gerda Scheepers

By applying imagery as short-hand for both her own art making process or specific (cultural) signs and figurations, Gerda Scheepers explores the medium of painting. Content and formal elements of painting are remixed through cut, copy and paste with the results actively pursuing ambiguity. Her paintings, as well as her sculptures, operate like devices for containment that, ultimately crucially, fail to contain. Scheepers delves into the techniques of collage and decoupage, using them as visual and linguistic instruments to disrupt the continuum of the familiar and enable a continuum between apparently disparate registers. Simultaneously, she employs collage as a tool to didactically, and sometimes humorously, imitate the brutal fragmentation brought on by life’s daily efforts. In Scheepers’ words, “the studio functions somehow as a capsule, where possibilities and restrictions play themselves out.” ...

Based in a 360 sqm gallery in Woodstock, Cape Town, blank was founded by Jonathan Garnham as a project space in 2005 and transitioned into a commercial gallery during 2012. The gallery represents emerging and increasingly established artists from the region in a critically engaged programme that emphasises contemporaneity, with a focus on concept and abstraction in the African context. With an exhibition programme that has a reputation for shaping the discourse around contemporary art in South(ern) Africa, and participation in prominent local and international art fairs, we seek to place our artists' work in a wide range of private and institutional collections. In addition, blank continues to promote the visual arts in our community through ongoing projects that support the sector. ...