SASHA HARTSLIEF

NEW WORKS

Everard Read, Cape Town, is delighted to present an exhibition of new oil paintings by Sasha Hartslief.

28 July - 10 August 2011

Her romanticised oil paintings, predominantly of women, provoke and beguile. They include women on stairwells and in bars, peering from recesses and behind curtains, reclining, in repose, preening or performing private and public rituals. Their attire suggests contemporaneity, yet they are imbued with a sense of "otherness" and ethereality through Hartslief´s brooding, nocturnal palette and loose, lyrical sense of line. They may be of our time but they are displaced from a specific historical moment. Dark-haired, doe-eyed, sensual sylphs and waifs, they are physically alluring, but their beauty is slightly sullied and melancholic. When they meet our gaze - wistfully or in almost sullen, defiant confrontation - they seem to look not at us, but often through us.

- Hazel Friedman