Cathy Abraham b. 1968 in Cape Town, South Africa where she currently lives and works. She specialised in process-based art at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts, University of Cape Town (UCT), where she graduated with an MFA (with Distinction) in 2018. Abraham’s creative work brings together seemingly disparate entities through participation and a ritual based practice. She works in film, mixed media, installation, painting and sculpture though her choice of media is primarily informed by her subject matter. In 2018, Abraham’s MFA culminated in a solo exhibition titled, A Deeper Kind of Nothing.
Selected group exhibitions include most recently A Line Beyond at the AVA in Cape Town curated by Olga Speakes 2021, the Great South African Nude at Everard Read in Johannesburg, and Spring Art Fair at SMAC Gallery in Stellenbosch, both in 2009; Domestic Departures at The Forge in Cape Town in 2011; In Good Company, curated by Michael Chandler at the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town in 2013; Art/Out of the Ordinary, curated by Marilyn Martin at the Association of Visual Arts (AVA) in Cape Town in 2015; The Shape of Nothing at Michaelis Galleries, UCT; The Spirit of Stern, curated by Michael Chandler at the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town; and The Space Between, curated by Mari Macdonald at the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town, all in 2016. Abraham presented a solo exhibition at the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town in 2013, entitled Undying Entanglement, comprised of installation, film and works on paper.
Abraham works systematically with repetitive gestures as a way of thinking through the patterns that mark our daily existence. The highly developed surfaces of her works consider boundaries between reality, fantasy and illusion.
Abraham refers to the repeated brushstrokes in her paintings and drawings as ‘ghosts’. A metaphor for the spectre of trauma and its haunting of memory, these ‘ghosts’ are counted and numbered with reference to the Kabbalah. Abraham’s spiritual and formal practice challenges notions of time and space, collapsing past, present and future.