Gretchen Van Der Byl

Gretchen van der Byl is a lecturer specialising in Painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts (2001) and Master of Fine Arts (2004). Her research is interdisciplinary, but always grounded within a self-reflexive examination of the foundational assumptions made by, and about, painting itself. These assumptions include flatness, surface, mark, frame, singularity, and most fundamentally, representation. She is interested in the particular mechanisms by which the viewer attends to the content of a painted image rather than the materials of which it is made. Her work explores the capacities of paint to describe the world in an ostensibly representational way, speak to material sympathies and antipathies between subject and medium, gendered looking and description, covert and disguised violence, and the very limits of representation itself. Extended material explorations into sculptural installation, print and text question the assumptions of dimensionality posed by painting. Error, fictional invention, impossibility, eccentric inquiry, and the futile gesture are all important generative spaces within her practice.

Solo Exhibitions

2005 – Some Observations, Association for Visual Arts

2007 – Cynopolis, Association for Visual Arts

2010 – We Already Know How This Will End, Association for Visual Arts

2012 – Today is the Yesterday of Tomorrow (or, finding a bit of order amidst all the disorder), Commune1

2016 – Lysis, Rust en Vrede

Selected Group Exhibitions

Michaelis School of Fine Art Graduate Exhibition 2001, 2004

Sasol Finalist exhibition 2003
Picnic, Bell-Roberts Gallery 2003
Absa L'atelier Finalist exhibition 2004

Finalist Exhibition, BP Portrait Award, 2006
Summer Salon, Bell-Roberts Gallery 2008
Spaces that Matter, Centre for African Studies Gallery, UCT 2008

Smorgasbord, Wessel Snyman Gallery 2010
Ways of Seeing, ORE Gallery 2010
Artworks in Progress, Michaelis Gallery, UCT 2010
10 years ON, Michaelis Gallery, UCT 2011
Judgement, Uitspraak 2011 Case No. 001/05/2008, AVA Gallery, 2011