Exhibition: Motherhood

An exhibition of paintings and drawings by the award winning artist Susanne du Toit (born 1955).

At the centre of Susanne du Toit’s latest series of portraits, Motherhood, are three generations of the same family. The subjects of these paintings are her daughters, sharing intimate and often
uncomfortable moments with their own children – in the womb, at the breast, finding their feet.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the canvas there is du Toit herself, grandmother and painter, reliving the harsh and formative experience of motherhood through these scenes.

By painting her own flesh and blood, du Toit is able to represent not just the inner life of her model, but a rich and complicated relationship between artist and subject. It is unclear where the personality of the artist ends and those of her sitters begin, and the emotional intensity of the Motherhood portraits only heightens this ambiguity. The resulting paintings have something uncanny about them: as du Toit’s decisive brushstrokes and luminous palette bring these uncertain depths to the surface, closeness become distance, the familiar becomes unfamiliar.