South African artist Kate Gottgens recently took to social media to accuse Cape Town gallery SMAC of failing to either pay her for works the gallery had sold or return the works if they were still in the gallery’s possession.
On July 2, she posted an image of her painting Audible Doom (2011) to Instagram. In the green-hued, hazy scene, a female figure, apparently with a bag over her head, stands on a ledge, seemingly addressing several other shadowy figures. Gottgens asked, “Has anyone seen this painting?” She said that SMAC displayed it at the Miart fair in 2022 and that it did not sell. It was not returned to her “in spite of many requests over the last 4 years,” she wrote in the post, which she has since deleted.
She said that since she left the gallery eight months ago, the gallery had repeatedly promised to either pay for the work or return it, but that it had done neither. Several other paintings are also unaccounted for, she says, though the gallery has told her they are “on the way back.”
“I resorted to Instagram because after months of emails and WhatsApps I wasn’t getting anything transparent or honest from them,” Gottgens told ARTnews in a phone call the day after her post. “I left the gallery eight months ago after 10 or 12 years of being with them. It was very difficult. It’s taken eight months of emailing every day to get money back and there are still three works that are in captivity in Belgium since 2022.”
