Claire Gavronsky | Drawn together

Goodman Gallery is delighted to present two concurrent exhibitions by members of the duo rosenclaire: Claire Gavronsky’s​​​​​​​ Drawn together, a presentation of new paintings by Claire Gavronsky and her first solo show in London. This body of work focuses on the atmosphere shared between women within the worlds that they build and inhabit together: intricate, subtle, complex, close, complicit, reciprocal.

The paintings explore the unguarded naturalness that women share together in their own company, a place absent from the male gaze. The composition and use of materials by the artists highlights resilience, a sense of care and community. An emphasis is placed on removing any trace of the spectacle, giving way to an ease, confidence and appreciation of intrinsic beauty. In work such as Limbo figures of women exist in a suspended, liminal space, their naked bodies defying objectification as they flaunt a practical lack of inhibition.

Colour ranges from subtle whispers to loud accents, from faintly present to sensory explosions. There is also a move between linear precision and washes that merge bodies into one another. These formal choices model the fusing of the physical and the emotional in the connection between women.

Claire Gavronsky (b. 1957, Johannesburg) works in a variety of mediums, most notably in painting and sculpture. Her work often uses visual references to historical paintings, and cues are sometimes taken from events from everyday life. Memory, racism, violence against women and children are some of the themes which run through her oeuvre. 

Gavronsky moved to Florence, Italy in 1985 and established, with fellow artist Rose Shakinovsky, an international artist’s residency both in Tuscany and Cape Town. Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky collaborate as the artist  “rosenclaire”, as wives and as dedicated mentors who have run a renowned artists residency program in Tuscany for the past 30 years. 

Notable solo and group exhibitions include: Io e Me. Autoritratti nel Lockdown. Sala 1, Centro Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2021); Speechless with Rose Shakinovsky, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2018); Right to the Future, Museum of 20th and 21st Century Art, St Petersburg (2017); Colour Theory with Rose Shakinovsky, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2014); Dakar Biennale, Dakar (2010); and Dystopia, collaboration with William Kentridge, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Ghent (2009-2010). 

Gavronsky lives and works in Florence, Italy.