LOUISE MASON

(1976 Johannesburg, South Africa)

Born in Johannesburg in 1976, Mason graduated with a honours degree in Fine Art at Stellenbosch University in 1998. While living in rural France for almost 2 years, she found the inspiration and the market for her first body of commercial work, mainly landscapes and abstract agricultural scenes. Through her husband’s involvement in the wine industry she was commissioned to illustrate catalogues and design wine labels for a large wine merchant based in the UK.

On returning to Cape Town in 2000 Louise continued to produce commissioned works for both private and corporate clients the most notable of which was the large body of work (550 originals) commissioned by the then Arabella Sheraton (Now Westin Grand) Hotel on the Foreshore.

The subject matter of Mason's work, although wide and varied, is typically centred around the aesthetic use of colour, form and texture. Imbued with hints of nostalgia, the 2015/2016 series of Beach Paintings personifies for the artist 'surface areas of shapes and colour - instantly abstract compositions’. These wilfully crowded beachscapes punctuate with simple and repetitive patterns and rhythms; developing further into her recent Informal Settlement series. Here, from an elevated perspective, nuisances of the narratives are filled with jostling anonymity - where houses are reduced to geometric shapes, their close arrangement overlapping and colliding much like the people who live in them.

These all serve to reinforce the artists desire to investigate the congested spaces we choose to inhabit. Do people find comfort in congregation? Does anonymity afford us privacy in close proximity? For Mason ‘an alternative view provides us with a different dimension on something we are used to seeing on a horizontal scale. Its context changes. All is not what it seems’.

SELECTED RECENT SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2019 Unravel, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2017 Flight, Everard Read, London, United Kingdom

SELECTED RECENT GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024   Winter Collection, Everard Read, Franschhoek, South Africa

2022 Spring, group show, Everard Read, Franschhoek, South Africa

         Things I’d like to remember, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2019 Summer, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2018 Summer, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2017 Summer Exhibition, Everard Read Gallery, London, United Kingdom

         Summer Exhibition, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

         Winter Collection, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

         Cubicle Series, CIRCA Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

2016 Summer Exhibition, CIRCA Gallery London, London, United Kingdom

         Winter Collection, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

         Christmas Collection, Everard Read Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2015 Summer in the City, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

         Homage, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

        WINTER, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

         EMPIRE, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa  

2014 Summer, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

         Winter, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Arabella Sheraton (Now Westin Grand) Hotel

Private collections in Australia, Dubai, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom and USA