Gitte Möller (b. Cape Town, 1991) received her BA in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2015 and was awarded the Judy Steinberg painting prize for her graduate show. Möller uses a range of different mediums and painterly devices to explore the symbolic and numinous possibilities of art-making. Drawing from ancient mythology, manuscripts and prayer paintings to motivational images and functional graphics, Möller’s works holds a complex array of signs, symbols and archetypes in suspension. Through a solitary game of exquisite corpse, fragments of discarded and disregarded aesthetics are rehabilitated by way of exaggerated symbolism to give expression to issues concerning the soul, femininity and fear. These are connected both positively and negatively to her own social and domestic context. As a whole, Möller’s work is enshrined in pseudo veneration: a halfhearted defence mechanism that responds to the anxieties of dual consciousness. There is the feeling of hypnosis gone wrong - of the mind being fully aware of the body’s betrayal and having to reconcile this experience into a single representation (now and again failing or succeeding). In this complex visual space, she offers a distracted meditation on a world interpolated by empathy and apathy, freedom and vulnerability and the struggle between good and evil.
