Kate Gottgens | Her own myth

Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Kate Gottgens’ ‘Her own myth’, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. The show comes ahead of Gottgens solo exhibition at Norval Foundation in September 2026.

Central to Gottgens’ practice is the collecting of found everyday photographs. Gottgens then selects and recontextualises figures and elements in environments, pulling from multiple photographs to produce a new narrative on canvas. This borrowing and dislocating from the original – often suburban – scenes defies nostalgia, enabling a looser story disconnected from an identifiable time and place, with space for critique of a collective memory. Here the beautiful exists alongside the ominous, domestic encounters with sinister underbellies.

The evolution of Gottgens’ work has seen a leaning towards translucent, ephemeral, spectral figures. Their temporal quality allows them to be imagined as existing in multiple planes. This can be seen in ‘Her own myth’, an exhibition of multi-scaled oil paintings and monoprints inspired by fairy tales and mythology alongside poetry, cinema and landscapes in woodblock ukiyo-e prints.