Gerda Scheepers (b. 1979 in Tzaneen, ZA)
By applying imagery as short-hand for both her own art making process or specific (cultural) signs and figurations, Gerda Scheepers explores the medium of painting. Content and formal elements of painting are remixed through cut, copy and paste with the results actively pursuing ambiguity. Her paintings, as well as her sculptures, operate like devices for containment that, ultimately crucially, fail to contain. Scheepers delves into the techniques of collage and decoupage, using them as visual and linguistic instruments to disrupt the continuum of the familiar and enable a continuum between apparently disparate registers. Simultaneously, she employs collage as a tool to didactically, and sometimes humorously, imitate the brutal fragmentation brought on by life’s daily efforts. In Scheepers’ words, “the studio functions somehow as a capsule, where possibilities and restrictions play themselves out.”
Scheepers graduated from the Dusseldorf Art Academy in 2005 and won the Art Cologne Preis fur junge Kunst in 2006. Solo exhibitions include The Way The Lamp (ak contemporary, Cologne, 2021), CologneRooms (Mary Mary Gallery, 2019), fabric actors (Galerie PCP, 2018), Body Corporate (Mary Mary Gallery, 2016), Sitcom (blank projects, 2016), PSYCHO SOCIO SURFACE (blank projects, 2014), A Social Life (Of Image) (Mary Mary Gallery, 2013), Modal Approach and Accent (blank projects, 2012) and Low and partial: Romantic Comedy (Kunstverein Nuremberg, 2012). In 2012, she was awarded the Marianne-Defet- Malerei-Stipendium.
Numerous key galleries and museums such as Norval Museum have featured Gerda Scheepers's work in the past.
Group show at a major institution: KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Reviewed by a major art publication: frieze
Included in a major biennial: Glasgow International

Gerda Scheepers has been featured in articles for Artthrob, ARTnews and MOUSSE Magazine. The most recent article is Beauty and Prisons:‘I Have Made a Place’ at Norval Foundation written for Artthrob in August 2021