” I moved to Kalk Bay in 1997 with great trepidation because I loved living in the city and whenever I came over Boyes Drive to visit my partner I had to put on a jersey! The wind unsettled me.
However, I have since encountered many wonderful people and have found such a warm sense of community that I now find the South-easter a small price to pay for living here. I am even growing fond of it!”
Louise, ever modest about her wonderful achievements and superbly sensitive paintings, was shy about supplying us with her resume, but we would like to blow her trumpet for her!
Louise Linder. BA(FA), MFA, MPhil.
Born in Beira, Mozambique
1982 BA Fine Art
1986 MFA (with distinction)
1991 Permanent installation of relief sculpture (15 m x 6 m) commissioned by and installed
at the University of Cape Town
1996 MPhil (with distinction)
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2009 Joao Ferreira Gallery, Cape Town
2008 Joao Ferreira Gallery, Cape Town
2006 Group Show, Strydom Gallery, George
2004 AVA Gallery, Cape Town
2000 AVA Gallery, Cape Town
Millennium Gallery, Pretoria
My earlier paintings, informed by photographs taken from my childhoodin Mozambique, represented aspects of growing up in a colonial period and explored themes such as family, alienation, loss and memory.
My last two exhibitions, entitled From Here to Eternity, drew from found
anonymous albums set in the 1950s, with snapshots of young carefree
women in the prime of innocent youth before marriage and the
responsibilities of families. They seem ostensibly disconnected from
the broader historical picture, inconsequential, just young South
African girls unaware of much else. I decontextualised the figures
from their physical space, floating them in an expansive ground
reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s colour-fields.
The contrast of realism within abstraction appears to distill the starkness or intensity of presence, the present moment and being locked within eternity (thefrozen moment that has irrevocably passed). The paintings are reduced,
intentionally, to the subject posing for the camera and the painterly
ground, and consequently the narrative is not allowed to extend beyond
these two factors in order to intensify the sense of presence and the
notion of time and memory.
Despite their celebratory nature, there is also a sense of mourning the passing of time and death.