Gina Kuschke

°1992, Cape Town, South-Africa.
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom.

Gina Kuschke's multi-laminated works excavate a texture of impulse, rhythm, and chance, pushing through the physical space of painting – as act, space and object – whilst working jointly through the temporal space of sound. Treating the support as a recording device and witness to the body drawing in space, her vast, multi-layered canvases are translations of her lived experience of the world. Kuschke's dynamic, performative handling evince the figure yet retain a malleability of motion and meaning. The air crackles with excitement at the inexorable contests between passages of paint. It is this collision between form and space; structure and action that so nourishes Kuschke's effervescent, animated painting.

Kuschke regards her compositions as both a performance and an event. Multi-layered and textured, she treats the surface of her compositions as a field of improvisation and excavation, revealing forms and structures throughout the multiple iterations of her mark making. Living between South Africa and London as a child, Kuschke's paintings are a response to her cumulative experience of the world, navigating both a developing country and western nation. Engaging with the surface as a search engine, Kuschke works the paintings until they reflect a true translation or sensation of her lived experience. In this way, Kuschke's surfaces act as witness to her body's impulses and convulsions, mechanized by her internal rhythm as a musician.  

Gina Kuschke studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2015 and graduated from the Royal College of Art this summer having completed an MA in Painting.