By applying imagery as short-hand for both her own art making process or specific (cultural) signs and figurations, Gerda Scheepers explores the medium of painting. Content and formal elements of painting are remixed through cut, copy and paste with the results actively pursuing ambiguity. Her paintings, as well as her sculptures, operate like devices for containment that, ultimately crucially, fail to contain. Scheepers delves into the techniques of collage and decoupage, using them as visual and linguistic instruments to disrupt the continuum of the familiar and enable a continuum between apparently disparate registers. Simultaneously, she employs collage as a tool to didactically, and sometimes humorously, imitate the brutal fragmentation brought on by life’s daily efforts. In Scheepers’ words, “the studio functions somehow as a capsule, where possibilities and restrictions play themselves out.”
