A SOFTWARE FOR FEELING by Gretta Louw

Gretta Louw is a South African-born Australian artist, writer, and curator. She received her BA with Honours from the University of Western Australia in 2002, subsequently living in Japan and New Zealand before moving to Germany in 2007. 

The show explores the themes that have been ongoing in her work for several years regarding the confluences between technology, culture, and nature; the inextricable interweaving of these active forces. In material terms the pieces in the show combine digital, algorithmic, AI tools with traditional techniques from art and craft history such as oil painting, needlework and embroidery, as well as ink painting on textiles. The motifs of threads, jellyfish, tentacles, and fungi all point towards an underlying approach to look systemically at the world at its current intersecting impasses. Louw is interested in networks across the digital, the social, cultural, environmental, organic and metaphysical.

Her work has been exhibited widely in public institutions and galleries such as the Wro Art Center (PL), Honor Fraser Gallery (US), Kunstmuseum Solothurn (CH), Münchner Stadtmuseum (DE), bitforms (US), UNSW Galleries (AUS), LABoral (ESP), and Galeri Nasional Indonesia (IDN). She has received numerous awards including an Australia Council Career Development Grant (2019), a Visual Art Prize from the Cultural Department of the City of Munich (2019), the Bahnwärter Stipendium by the City of Esslingen am Neckar (2017), and the Heinrich Vetter Preis of the City of Mannheim (2014), amongst others.