26/09/2026
Stand close and you see nothing. Just thousands of hand-painted concentric circles, colour beside colour, an abstract field of dots. Take three steps back and a face appears.
Gavin Rain (Cape Town, 1971) studied both art and neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town, and that combination runs through everything he makes. He developed his neo-pointillist technique around 2004, drawing on Seurat and the Russian avant-garde, and built a system around it: every dot is made up of roughly five colours applied in carefully calibrated layers, chosen from a list of more than fourteen thousand tones. The exact distance at which the image resolves is calculated in advance.
His message is simple, and it is built into the technique itself: you have to step back. Up close, life is cluttered and full of noise. Only from a distance do you see how it is all assembled from individual points.
He has painted Mandela, Marilyn Monroe and Beyoncé, exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and was commissioned by FIFA to create twelve portraits for the 2010 World Cup.
This is work no photograph can fully capture. Come and see it, and walk back and forth while you do.
The exhibition is open now.
