Geneviève Fatzer (ZA, 1998) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting and printmaking, drawing together the vibrancy of formalist abstraction with the intimacy of emotive expression. Working predominantly with bold colour palettes and gestural mark-making, her work becomes a visceral inquiry into mood, memory, and presence. Guided by an intuitive relationship to colour, Fatzer treats hue and tone as emotional signifiers, tools through which inner states are externalized and spatial relationships reconsidered.

Fatzer was raised in a culturally diverse environment with strong Eurocentric family ties. These diverse cultural links heavily influenced Fatzer’s interest towards the arts which lead her to pursue her artistic career by studying Fine Arts at Stellenbosch University (2020). She then furthered her education by completing her Masters degree in Arts & Society at Utrecht University (2022). Fatzer’s early exposure to varied perspectives informs a practice rooted in dualities: structure and spontaneity, familiarity and estrangement, clarity and ambiguity.

Her paintings are forged through a dynamic process of scraping, pouring, and reworking. Each gesture is a response; each composition, a negotiation between control and surrender. There is a meditative quality to her layering, a slow-building intensity that draws the viewer into a moment of suspended reflection.Now based in Amsterdam, Fatzer continues to explore themes of intimacy and introspection through colour and form. She cites the influence of Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, and Mongezi Ncaphayi in her lyrical abstraction. Their emphasis on emotive resonance and formal experimentation echoes in her own approach. With each body of work, she invites us into her interior landscape, offering paintings not as definitive statements but as open-ended spaces of inquiry.

Studio Practice

In my studio, I paint as a way of reaching toward intimacy, both with myself and with others. My work unfolds through bold gestures, vibrant colour, and shifting textures, but beneath the surface, it’s a search for connection. Painting across multiple canvases, I allow colour relationships and compositional rhythms to develop organically, using scraping, pouring, and reworking as means of emotional inquiry rather than just formal construction.

Each mark I make is a response. Sometimes quiet, sometimes urgent, to the intangible feelings I carry. Through these layers, I try to give form to what often feels unshareable: a sense of longing, a flicker of rage, the tenderness of memory. There is an emotional solitude in art that I return to again and again. Art has a peculiar way of speaking uniquely to each of us. What one person finds exhilarating, another may experience as isolating. For me, this subjectivity is both beautiful and profoundly lonely. I often wish that those closest to me could feel what I feel when I stand before a centuries-lost masterpiece: a deep, aching intimacy that collapses time. That wish, that need to bridge the emotional gap between artist and viewer, is at the core of why I paint. My practice is a gesture of invitation: to pause, to reflect, to feel with me.

I work within the tradition of lyrical abstraction, using colour and gesture to carry emotional weight. But my aim isn’t purely formal. It’s relational. I hope to offer the viewer not just an image, but an emotional space, a shared moment where inner lives can briefly align. In this way, each painting becomes an attempt at closeness, an offering of presence, and a quiet reminder that feeling deeply is its own form of meaning.