Gabrielle Raaff’s inspiration is drawn from personal experience and how the world we live in has affected her and people she knows or comes across. Raaff's works begins with a photographic image as a springboard. The medium of photography and its ability to fix an image is what piques her interest. The artist works with ethereality, using the media of ink, watercolour and water-based oil as a vehicle for alluding to the form, the function and the emotion of her subject. Raaff is interested in the space and arrangement of local neighbourhoods and the everyday goings-on of the people that inhabit them. Some works revel in the abstract qualities of the view while recent works play out in a more intimate, painterly relationship with the subject.
A painter and educator, Raaff was born in Johannesburg but now lives and works in Cape Town. She graduated with a BAFA (HDE) from the University of Stellenbosch in 1992. She won a Santam Scholarship in 1991 and in 1992 was an Absa L’Atelier finalist and won the Muratie Painting Award. In 2007 Raaff was a Spier Contemporary Finalist. She has been invited to participate in more than 50 group exhibitions, the most recent held in 2019; Emphatic Whispers, SMITH Gallery, Cape Town. Her latest of four solo exhibitions was Echoes from the South, at SMITH Gallery, Cape Town in 2019.
×Gabrielle Raaff’s inspiration is drawn from personal experience and how the world we live in has affected her and people she knows or comes across. Raaff's works begins with a photographic image as a springboard. The medium of photography and its ability to fix an image is what piques her interest. The artist works with ethereality, using the media of ink, watercolour and water-based oil as a vehicle for alluding to the form, the function and the emotion of her subject. Raaff is interested in the space and arrangement of local neighbourhoods and the everyday goings-on of the people that inhabit them. Some works revel in the abstract qualities of the view while recent works play out in a more intimate, painterly relationship with the subject.
A painter and educator, Raaff was born in Johannesburg but now lives and works in Cape Town. She graduated with a BAFA (HDE) from the University of Stellenbosch in 1992. She won a Santam Scholarship in 1991 and in 1992 was an Absa L’Atelier finalist and won the Muratie Painting Award. In 2007 Raaff was a Spier Contemporary Finalist. She has been invited to participate in more than 50 group exhibitions, the most recent held in 2019; Emphatic Whispers, SMITH Gallery, Cape Town. Her latest of four solo exhibitions was Echoes from the South, at SMITH Gallery, Cape Town in 2019.
