Jeanne Gaigher (b.1990) lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. Gaigher’s artistic practice is characterized by a deep engagement with texture, layers, and the interplay between abstraction and figuration. Gaigher engages layered narrative and metaphysical inquiry through an expanded painting practice that incorporates water-based media, scrim, and sewn interventions.
Her  compositions unfold across transparent and opaque surfaces, functioning more as temporal, cinematic fields than static images. Scrim serves as a porous membrane that complicates the relationship between surface and depth, while sewing is employed not as a nod to textile craft but as a formal strategy to disrupt and reconfigure the pictorial plane. Linework plays a critical role in animating ambiguous, hybrid forms—infusing the work with psychological intensity and a sense of unstable, evolving biology.
Jeanne Gaigher’s practice is shaped by recurring themes of sacrifice, longing, and transcendence— influenced by her Afrikaans Christian upbringing—yet critically reimagined through the lens of landscape and enclosures. South African terrains, drawn from personal memory, historical imagery, and lived experience, are deployed as sites of projection where the biological interior and surroundings converge. This convergence reflects a wariness toward our existential desire to merge with landscape—an impulse that, while driven by longing and passion, can produce unsettling and even violent consequences. Animals, flora, and atmospheric elements operate as semiotic agents, carrying text, emotion, and myth across the visual field. Informed by Antjie Krog’s idea of translation as an expansive and destabilizing force, her work treats image-making as an open system: one that translates language into form, spiritual experience into symbolic narrative, and localised context into layered, speculative space.
Recent solo exhibitions include Mind Middle at Paulina Caspari (Munich, DE, 2024), group psyche at RESERVOIR (Cape Town, ZA, 2023), Hot Dipping at Emanuele Catellani Contemporary (Turin, IT, 2023) and Anatomy Lesson at Wschòd (Warsaw, PL, 2022).
Selected group exhibitions include: Homesick for Another World at Madragoa (Lisbon, PRT, 2025), Cannibal Nature at Baró Galeria (Mallorca, ESP, 2025), my galaxy at Paulina Caspari (Munich, DE, 2025), Memories We Have Forgotten at The Address Gallery (Brescia, IT, 2024), The Sieve of Secrecy at Paulina Caspari and beacon (both Munich, DE, 2023) and Labyrinth at Kirstin Hjellegjerde Gallery (London, UK, 2022).
Recognitions include residencies such as tac.residency in Tuscany, Italy and the Villa Filanda Antonini residency under the Arper Feltrin Foundation.
Her presentation Insides with Reservoir Projects at Arco Madrid Fair 2025 was awarded the Young Artist Prize 2025.
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Jeanne Gaigher
pretend that you are somebody else. take somebody’s life and color it in with your own. text from Antjie Krog’s A change of tongue (1), 2025
Ink, watercolor, acrylic, scrim, raw canvas, thread
185 x 125cm
 
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
pretend that you are somebody else. take somebody’s life and color it in with your own. text from Antjie Krog’s A change of tongue (1), 2025
Ink, watercolor, acrylic, scrim, raw canvas, thread
185 x 125cm
 
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
pretend that you are somebody else. take somebody’s life and color it in with your own. text from Antjie Krog’s A change of tongue (1), 2025
Ink, watercolor, acrylic, scrim, raw canvas, thread
185 x 125cm
 
Jeanne Gaigher
pretend that you are somebody else. take somebody’s life and color it in with your own. text from Antjie Krog’s A change of tongue (2), 2025
Ink, watercolor, acrylic, scrim, raw canvas, thread
185 x 125cm
 
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
pretend that you are somebody else. take somebody’s life and color it in with your own. text from Antjie Krog’s A change of tongue (2), 2025
Ink, watercolor, acrylic, scrim, raw canvas, thread
185 x 125cm
 
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
pretend that you are somebody else. take somebody’s life and color it in with your own. text from Antjie Krog’s A change of tongue (2), 2025
Ink, watercolor, acrylic, scrim, raw canvas, thread
185 x 125cm
 
Jeanne Gaigher
wheel of love, 2025
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, scrim, raw canvas, thread
195 x 136 cm
 
Jeanne Gaigher
wheel of love, 2025 – Detail
Jeanne Gaigher
wheel of love, 2025 – Detail
Jeanne Gaigher
The constant risk of mimicking other _______, or of being at constant risk of being forced into a relationship with ________, 2025
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, scrim, raw canvas, thread
203 x 180 cm
 
Jeanne Gaigher
Lymphatic alphabet, 2025
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, scrim, raw canvas, thread
180 x 110 cm
 
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
Lymphatic alphabet, 2025
Left – Jeanne Gaigher
forever, just one more time than never, 2024
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, raw canvas, bookbinders scrim thread, pastels and oilpastels
126 x 200 cm
Right – Jeanne Gaigher
we, we will stay together, 2024
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, raw canvas, bookbinders scrim thread, pastels and oilpastels
126 x 197 cm
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
forever, just one more time than never, 2024
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
forever, just one more time than never, 2024
Jeanne Gaigher – Mind Middle
Paulina Caspari, Munich
21.06.– 27.07.2024
Jeanne Gaigher
mind, middle, sensations
choking with expectation how could things be otherwise
a world evolving according to it’s own rhythms
responsive life
a sequence from the back to the front (sketch 2), 2023
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, scrim, Belgian linen and thread
200 x 49.5 cm
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
mind, middle, sensations
choking with expectation how could things be otherwise
a world evolving according to it’s own rhythms
responsive life
a sequence from the back to the front (sketch 2), 2023
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
mind, middle, sensations
choking with expectation how could things be otherwise
a world evolving according to it’s own rhythms
responsive life
a sequence from the back to the front (sketch 2), 2023
Jeanne Gaigher
mind, middle, sensations
choking with expectation how could things be otherwise
a world evolving according to it’s own rhythms
responsive life
a sequence from the back to the front (sketch 3), 2023
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, scrim, Belgian linen and thread
200 x 49.5 cm 
Jeanne Gaigher
Installation view – group psyche, RESERVOIR Projects, Cape Town, ZA
Jeanne Gaigher
Installation view – group psyche, RESERVOIR Projects, Cape Town, ZA
Jeanne Gaigher
mind, middle, sensations
choking with expectation
how could things be otherwise a world evolving according to it’s own rhythms
responsive life
a sequence from the back to the front (sketch 4), 2023
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, scrim, raw canvas, Belgian linen and thread
96 x 113 x 5.5 cm
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
mind, middle, sensations
choking with expectation how could things be otherwise
a world evolving according to it’s own rhythms
responsive life
a sequence from the back to the front (sketch 3), 2023
Jeanne Gaigher
The sieve of secrecy (sequence no1), 2023
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, raw canvas, bookbinders scrim, thread
200 x 135 cm
 
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher 
The sieve of secrecy (sequence no1), 2023
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, raw canvas, bookbinders scrim, thread
200 x 135 cm
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
The sieve of secrecy (sequence no2), 2023
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, raw canvas, bookbinders scrim, thread
200 x 135 cm
 
Jeanne Gaigher
The sieve of secrecy (sequence no2), 2023
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, raw canvas, bookbinders scrim, thread
200 x 135 cm 
Jeanne Gaigher
Dimensions of a dialogue II, 2022
Acrylic, ink, watercolor, scrim, raw canvas, thread
300 x 500 cm
Jeanne Gaigher – Anatomy lesson
Wschód, Warsaw
26.02. – 23.04, 2022
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
Dimensions of a dialogue II, 2022
Acrylic, ink, watercolor, scrim, raw canvas, thread
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher
Dimensions of a dialogue II, 2022
Acrylic, ink, watercolor, scrim, raw canvas, thread
Jeanne Gaigher
If it’s for you, it won’t pass you, 2022
300 x 250cm
Jeanne Gaigher, Youssra Raouchi, Sofiia Yesakova – Memories we have forgotten
theaddressgallery, Brescia
10.02. – 27.03.2024
Detail – Jeanne Gaigher 
If it’s for you, it won’t pass you, 2022
300 x 250cm
Jeanne Gaigher
Arc, to look at or over, 2021
Acrylic, ink on canvas and scrim
138 × 173 cm
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