Marna Hattingh’s lyrical wilderness

Marna Hattingh has created a wonderful new limited edition screen print with us. Titled “Moment”, it’s a portrait of an emotional state, an inner world, where detailed, colourful anthropomorphic metaphors and mythological and natural references weave into and out of one another, describing a euphoric, dreamlike world in continual flux.
She explains: “The work aims to portray the recesses of a subconscious world, with narratives surfacing and descending in equal measure.”

With the artwork’s title and imagery suggestive of an ephemeral breeziness, the creative labour behind the artwork is anything but. Hattingh’s complex process is characterised by labour-intensive, intricate layering, where every brushstroke is considered, and every element carefully arranged.

This contrast of fleeting, surface-level lightness with weightiness and complexity is what Hattingh does best: Her work is renowned for its bright, colourful and playful visuals that veneer a darker, more sobering story beneath, where humour draws the viewer in to a kind of sensory ambush of overwhelming absurdity and satire.
This characteristic layering of her work – both in process and in subject – finds further meaning and technical ground within the screen print medium, where the image is deconstructed into more layers and then reconfigured to form this beguiling artwork.

VIEW / PURCHASE the art work here>>

For more insights into Hattingh’s practice, take a look at the video profile by her gallery, .M Contemporary: