Preller was born in Johannesburg and obtained her BA (Fine Arts) from UNISA in 1995 and her MA (Fine Arts) in 2001 from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She lives and works in Johannesburg.

Preller’s still lifes are silent, relatively monochromatic renderings of everyday objects, defamiliarised by the ambiguities and ambivalences that occur in the process of photography and its translation into paint. Photographic mediation is made visible by means of the negation of visible brush marks, reinforcing a surface that is at once photographic and painterly. The tension between the snapshot, as source material and the painting is effected by means of the deliberate photographic data – specifically the simplification and intensification of shadow and light.

“My paintings bear the imprint of the mechanical and impersonal language of the camera, becoming a means of altering the familiar. In this way photography is acknowledged as not simply reproducing the objects that surround us, but also as recycling or displacing it, setting it as a double remove.”

       

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