LOUISE MASON
(b. Johannesburg 1976)

Born in Johannesburg in 1976, Mason graduated with a honours degree in Fine Art at Stellenbosch University in 1998. While living in rural France for almost 2 years, she found the inspiration and the market for her first body of commercial work, mainly landscapes and abstract agricultural scenes. Through her husband’s involvement in the wine industry she was commissioned to illustrate catalogues and design wine labels for a large wine merchant based in the UK.

On returning to Cape Town in 2000 Louise continued to produce commissioned works for both private and corporate clients the most notable of which was the large body of work (550 originals) commissioned by the then Arabella Sheraton (Now Westin Grand) Hotel on the Foreshore.

Now a mother of three daughters, Louise is painting once again.

The subject matter of Mason's work, although wide and varied, is typically centred around the aesthetic use of colour, form and texture. Imbued with hints of nostalgia, the 2015/2016 series of Beach Paintings personifies for the artist 'surface areas of shapes and colour - instantly abstract compositions’. These wilfully crowded beachscapes punctuate with simple and repetitive patterns and rhythms; developing further into her recent Informal Settlement series. Here, from an elevated perspective, nuisances of the narratives are filled with jostling anonymity - where houses are reduced to geometric shapes, their close arrangement overlapping and colliding much like the people who live in them.

These all serve to reinforce the artists desire to investigate the congested spaces we choose to inhabit. Do people find comfort in congregation? Does anonymity afford us privacy in close proximity? For Mason ‘an alternative view provides us with a different dimension on something we are used to seeing on a horizontal scale. Its context changes. All is not what it seems’.

SELECTED RECENT SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2017
Flight, Everard Read, London, United Kingdom

SELECTED RECENT GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2017
Summer Exhibition, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Summer Exhibition II, Everard Read Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Summer Exhibition, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Winter Collection, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Cubicle Series, CIRCA Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

2016
Summer Exhibition, CIRCA Gallery London, London, United Kingdom
Winter Collection, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Christmas Collection, Everard Read Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2015
Summer in the City, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Homage, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
WINTER, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
EMPIRE, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

2014
Summer Season Part I, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Winter, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Arabella Sheraton (Now Westin Grand) Hotel
Private collections in Australia, Dubai, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom and USA