Gabrielle Raaff
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.
Read More
