Georgina Gratrix: Painting with Humour, Colour, and Critique

Georgina Gratrix paints in a bold, expressive voice that uses colour, texture, and humour to speak about life’s everyday absurdities. She layers thick oil paint with brush and palette knife to create vivid portraits, oversized still lifes, and lush landscapes. Her surfaces feel sculptural, almost three-dimensional, and they convey a sense of immediacy and playfulness. She invites viewers to reconsider familiar subjects through exaggerated forms and saturated hues.

Gratrix was born in Mexico City in 1982 and grew up in Durban on South Africa’s east coast. She studied fine art at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School, earning her degree in 2005. Her mixed heritage and youth in Durban shaped her perspective. She blends cultural references from Mexico, KwaZulu-Natal, and global pop culture into her imaginative worlds.

Gratrix works primarily in oil on canvas or linen, often augmenting paint with collage, prints, or mixed media. She also creates drawings, watercolours, monotypes, and pop-collages using educational book cutouts, neon stickers, and pipe cleaners. Her focus remains painting, and her method is physical and experimental. She smears, spreads, scrapes, and layers pigment until the canvas becomes an active surface.

Her portraits distort features in an affectionate yet ironic manner. She might show a social media influencer or Paris Hilton, but she inflates their traits; a painted face becomes a mask of decoration and texture. She often uses her phone snaps or magazine images as starting points, then transforms them through drawing and painting until the subjects mutate. The result is both familiar and unsettling. There is humour in the exaggeration, but also a critique of how the media frames identity.

In still lifes, she embraces the kitsch and banal, treating bouquets and everyday objects as theatrical subjects. She paints flowers overflowing from shimmering surfaces with bold strokes that balance form. Objects from her home and studio appear: sugar bowls, tapestries, plates of prawns, and ceramics by fellow artists. Her still lifes feel personal and cultural. They remind us that ordinary objects carry memory and connection.

Landscapes occupy a smaller part of her practice, but they reveal her roots in Durban. She paints tropical foliage and bird-filled scenes that saturate a canvas with life. In one extensive work from a recent Milan show, “Friends and Friends of Friends,” she painted a tropical forest at full scale, lush, crowded, and expressive. These landscapes echo her emotional bond with KwaZulu-Natal.

Her work expresses a dual message. She critiques the inflated importance we give to celebrity, art-world figures, and consumer culture. At the same time, she celebrates life’s fun, its texture, and pleasure. She places flowers and flamboyant scenes next to distorted faces. She makes us laugh. She makes us think. She disrupts seriousness with colour and form.

Gratrix cites German Expressionism and painters like De Kooning, Philip Guston, Picasso’s late work, Matisse, and Bhupen Khakhar as influences. She follows that lineage in her expressive brushwork and distortion. But she departs by mixing fine art history with pop-culture imagery. She borrows from modernist subjects and then flattens, fractures, and replays them in a kitschy way. She inverts seriousness.

Her mixture of structural depth and playfulness recalls artists like Philip Guston, who moved from abstraction to thickly painted, humorous imagery. Also, Maria Lassnig comes to mind in the personal, bodily distortions. She resonates with George Condo’s caricature-like figures and Picasso’s freedom with form. Her work matches these artists in spirit. She shares their courage to disrupt representation and add an emotional or comic twist.

Within South Africa, she connects to Irma Stern in colour and emotional charge. Gratrix cites Stern as someone she admires, and she’s exhibited in the Irma Stern Museum, using similar bold palettes and tropical themes. She echoes Stern’s expressive energy but injects critique and kitsch. She matches Stern’s passion and colour but updates it with contemporary irony.

Gratrix’s work says that representation is not neutral. She shows how portrait, still life, and landscape carry cultural weight. She exaggerates and distorts to highlight how images construct identity and value. She says everyday objects deserve attention. She says texture and colour matter. She says we live in a media world full of mediated faces, and we should be aware.

Her exhibition tracks her growing mastery. Her first solo show, “Master Copy,” challenged art history by flattening canonical images in 2008. She showed in Berlin in 2010. She earned awards like the Art Brussels Discovery Prize and the Ampersand Fellowship in 2018. Her Los Angeles shows in 2019 and 2020 brought her work to international attention. Her survey at Norval Foundation in 2021, the first museum solo, confirmed her status with 25 works spanning a decade. Her 2023 exhibition in Milan advanced her still life and landscape work. In 2024, she returned to Durban with a show focused on her home studio and local light. Her 2025 Cape Town exhibition continues this.

Gratrix works in painting because she seeks materiality. She wants the paint’s thickness and sensuality. She disrupts neat representation with messy texture. She wants the work to feel alive. She applies paint from tubes and knives because she wants energy and immediacy.

Her work speaks of memory, culture, and critique. She links Mexico and Durban. She links pop culture and art tradition. She links humour and criticism. She uses oil paint for its depth. She uses distortion for emotional effect. She uses kitsch to ask: what do we value?

Georgina Gratrix’s art legacy grows in South Africa and beyond. Her work hangs in significant collections like Norval, Missoni, and Peres Art Museum. She influences younger artists to twine humour with materiality. She blends critique and celebration. She redraws what portrait and still life can be. She celebrates the sensuality of paint. And she reminds us that art can be both beautiful and mischievous.