Mary Visser is a Cape Town-based visual artist. Rooted in the tactile pleasures of paint, her practice transforms sensory experience into a visual language that seeks connection with an inner wildness. Influenced by post-war American abstraction, German Expressionism, and the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, Visser embraces humour, awkwardness, and risk taking as central to her process.
'Painting is a place of doing and undoing, thoughtfulness and mischief. I seek to connect with my body’s intelligence through gesture and the pleasure of the tactile in order to articulate an emotional truth that resonates beyond language.
The nature of paint is sensory and the process fragmented; each next impulsive move either building or tearing down. Pushing gloopy drippy paint around; smearing and scrubbing the surface, then layering with oil stick across dry canvas. It’s a delicious bewilderment—my shaking hand making spidery lines, then small irritations or disappointments in me swelling into forceful gestures, crossing out and remaking.
The image arrives through making, not before. I bring what I have in the moment as I meet the painting, making do with what I have. I pick impulsively from the images strewed across the studio floor; torn magazine shards, song lyrics, photos of buildings, signage and street debris, crayon drawings and collages, fragments of rags, canvas and tape. I juxtapose and layer many disparate things much like thoughts, events and memories might be arranged in a dream. I make do with what I have in the moment; taking chances and feeling toward what I want to see. I play at being the nonchalant prankster. Like the Cat in the Hat chasing a pink stain from bath to dress to rug to snow outside, I move between canvases paint pot in hand, shifting spaces and upending images.
The forms that return most often recall bowls, a ship’s hull, a landscape view. Like a strange Rorschach, they surface through the physical labour of painting, recalled and re-imagined by the body - a hairstyle becomes a deckchair, an owl, a sock, a mushroom, a cat. Painting becomes a phenomenological act—a way of speaking non-verbally through gesture and material from within the body itself.
What excites me is the tension between freedom and containment, rock and sea, form and fluidity. The act of painting becomes the conduit for an image to break the surface and stay or to slip away to be caught another day.'
Mary holds a BFA in drawing and painting from Rhodes University and a Postgraduate Diploma in Art from the University of Cape Town. She has exhibited at Graham Contemporary in Johannesburg and WorldArt, Everard Read and the AVA Gallery in Cape Town.
Her work is in collections both locally and internationally, including the University of Cape Town, Nando’s, HBSC Bank and the New Constitutional Court, Johannesburg.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2021 'Celestial Trampoline', The Yard, Silo District, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town, South Africa
2018 'Funny Things are Everywhere', Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town, South Africa
'Assembly', Circa Gallery, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2011 'Along these City Streets', Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town, South Africa
2010 'The Weight of Light', The Bay Hotel, Camps Bay, South Africa
2005 'Nocturnes', UCT Irma Stern Museum Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024 ‘In Conversation: Mary Visser and Sibusiso Ngwazi’, EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, South Africa
Cape Town Art Fair, WorldArt
‘Imagine’, WORLDART, Cape Town, South Africa
2023 'Room With a View', Curated by Karen Elkington, EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, South Africa
'New Day', Graham Contemporary, Hyde Park Corner, Johannesburg, South Africa
2022 'Natural Abstraction', Graham Contemporary, Hyde Park Corner, Johannesburg, South Africa
2020 'Group Show', 131a gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2019 'Group Show', Eclectica Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2018 'Prelude', Worldart Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2017 'Summer Show', Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
'Out of Nowhere', Smith Studio Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2014 'Small Canvas' Project, Benetton Project (Venice Biennale)
2013 'Possession', Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2008 'New Works' (Mary Visser, Nick Bladen & Marieke Prinsloo), Grande Provence Gallery, Franschhoek, South Africa
1998 'Boudoir Biscuits Exhibition', UCT Irma Stern Museum Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
AWARDS
2003 Carpet Design (as part of The Boudoir Biscuits Artist Collective) Judges Chambers,
New Constitutional Court, Johannesburg, South Africa
2002 Runner-up in Convenco Public Art Work Competition, Cape Town Convention Centre
(as part of The Boudoir Biscuits Artist Collective and the women of St Anne's Home, Cape
Town)