Kate Gottgens: The Blue of Distance
18th July, 2025 – 13th September, 2025
HUXLEY-PARLOUR
3–5 Swallow Street
London W1B 4DE
“We love to contemplate blue … not because it advances to us, but because it draws
us after it.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Huxley-Parlour’s Swallow Street gallery presents The Blue of Distance, a new exhibition of paintings by South African artist Kate Gottgens. It is her second solo show with the gallery and marks a return to her quietly powerful exploration of memory, place, and the expressive possibilities of the colour blue.
The exhibition title is borrowed from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost and evokes the idea of distance—emotional as much as physical. Blue here is more than a colour; it becomes a metaphor for longing, transition, and the hazy terrain between past and future.
Image courtesy Huxley-Parlour, London.
Gottgens’s paintings continue her focus on scenes of everyday leisure: a rowing boat drifting across still water, the heavy shade of palm trees in a back garden, friends walking along a beach. Though rooted in the familiar, these images are rendered with an elusive, almost dreamlike quality. Faces are softened, details fade in and out, and the passage of time seems suspended.
In one painting, a man stands on the deck of a ferry; in another, a woman sunbathes in a garden chair. A group of women gaze towards the sea, their expressions left intentionally vague. These are scenes we recognise—perhaps from our own lives or from family photo albums—but there is always something withheld, a quiet distance that invites reflection rather than explanation.
That sense of ambiguity carries through in Gottgens’s technique. She moves between defined mark-making and loose, gestural brushwork, allowing forms to dissolve and re-emerge. Figures and landscapes blur at the edges, as if seen through a fogged lens or recalled from memory. The source material—often old photographs—is felt rather than directly shown.
Image courtesy Huxley-Parlour, London
The palette, too, contributes to the emotional register of the work. Saturated with greyish, icy, and inky blues, the paintings suggest the faded tones of vintage film. But they also echo the symbolic weight of blue in Western art history—from the skies of medieval frescoes to the robes of the Virgin Mary. There’s a subtle spirituality in Gottgens’s work, not overt but present in the stillness of her compositions and the inward gaze of her figures.
In drawing from both personal memory and shared cultural references, The Blue of Distance speaks to the universal experience of time passing. It captures the emotional texture of what remains—after people have gone, after moments have slipped away—leaving behind not answers, but atmosphere.
Kate Gottgens: The Blue of Distance opens on the 18th of July, 2025 until the 13th of September, 2025 at HUXLEY-PARLOUR
©2025 HUXLEY-PARLOUR
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