Clare Menck is one of South Africa’s finest mid-career painters. Her delicate paintings hint at the intimate moments which we all experience. These moments are closely related to the artist, her close family and friends, and have developed into a documentation of her public and private life. Michael Godby writes that Menck’s art is critically engaged with the materials of its own making. It is a meditative art. It engages with reality at some distance, either through the mediation of some form of image or through overtly constructed performance in the studio. In a very real way, this contemplative withdrawal to the studio reproduces the sense of alienation that is her invariable subject.