Lettie Gardiner

Lettie Gardiner held her first one-person exhibition in Johannesburg at Gallery 101 in 1971 and since then she has participated in numerous group shows and has held a number of solo exhibitions.

Gardiner has her work represented in private collections, in South Africa and abroad, as well as in public collections. Gardiner's work can be seen in the Mobil Collection and at the Rand Merchant Bank.

Lettie Gardiner has worked in acrylic, oils and gouache, and spent a number of years in the early 90s exploring papermaking. She held handmade paper exhibitions in 1991 at the Tupelo Gallery and at the Goodman Gallery during 1993.

Then she concentrated on acrylic on canvas, sometimes adding acid free paper pulp to the paint, which produces matt but nevertheless vibrant colour.

In 1999, she turned to painting heads on industrial paper and in May 2002 she exhibited 50 individual but clustered heads at the Art on Paper Gallery in Melville, Johannesburg.

Lettie Gardiner was selected as one of the 20 finalists in 2002 in the Johannesburg Art City competition and her entry (a portrait of a young girl's face) was mounted on a giant billboard outside the Oriental Plaza. In 2003, she was invited to exhibit at the 'Repositioning' exhibition of 24 works by women at the Rand Afrikaans University gallery.

Gardiners' recent work consists of painted portraits executed on used industrial drawing paper. The artist maintains the previous scribbles, notes, cover-ups, folds and discoloration of the drawings of machine parts and instructions for their assembly.

The works are hung as a large wall installation, resembling mug shots or model agency-style head shots, ultimately confusing the boundaries between similarity, difference, familiarity and distance. Through the grid structure, Gardiner suggests an organizing principle but the additional suggestion of possible interchangeability "suggests a re-evaluation of accepted structures".

Lettie Gardiner is a quite and very private person. This is reflected in the three prints that she made at The Artists' Press in 2004. Two of the images are close up portraits of a child in the one, and three adults in the other. All these people look out at the viewer and seem to question one as much as the viewer questions them.

The child appears to hide behind a screen. The engagement is at the same time simple and elusive. In the third print she used a photograph of Herero sex slaves from German South West Africa as her starting point. In her image she has managed to restore some dignity to these women. All three images have a fine background taken from a map and "blue-prints" from the reef mines. These create a contextual web for the images to rest on and refer to colonial exploitation, socially and economically.

Artists

New Editions

Lithographs 2004