Clarke was born in Simonstown in 1929, to a domestic worker mother and a dockworker father. He dropped out of high school and went to work on the docks, but word spread about his artistic talent, and he was offered work as a book illustrator, which led to a professional artistic and writing career. A watershed moment came when his family was forcibly removed from Simonstown to the ironically named inland ghetto of Ocean View as part of the enforcing of the apartheid Group Areas Act. Much of Clarke’s work and his subsequent political activism reflects on the dislocation of the experience.  

Text by art critic James Sey 

Dumile Feni—famously known as just Dumile—was born in Worcester, a small town outside of Cape Town, in 1942. He was raised in a Methodist family, by his father who was a policeman and his mother—a homemaker. However, he lost both parents—first his mother and then his father—before his teens. Though born Zwelidumile Mgxaji Mhlaba, the famed anti-apartheid artist would later enter the South African art stage as Dumile Feni—a gesture that would immortalize his late mother’s name, Bettie Nothemba Feni. Of course, one can’t say with certainty that the recurrent solicitude for maternal figures that pervades Dumile’s oeuvre emanates from this primary loss. However, the perpetual return, say, to the “mother and child” theme in the work, certainly isn’t motivated by a latent religious impulse to localize the Pieta. If anything, Dumile’s frequent portrayal of women, particularly in his pre-exile phase—he left South Africa in 1968—often provides clues on the callous and indiscriminate violence of the apartheid regime. The 1960s typified the height of political repression. Anguished Woman (1967/68) is a small but powerful bronze cast frontal torso of a female figure with a head plunged in between her shoulders. Her face delineates a deep sense of despondency as she stares into pitiless air, while her arms seem to be pulled to the back as if cuffed.

Here Dumile also slightly traps the viewer. By way of capturing her pain and pathos, the viewer isn’t just privy to the invisible presence of a culpable hand (placed at the back of the sculpture) which has obviously stripped this woman of her humanity and dignity. Gazing down at her twisted visage and body, we also become embroiled in the narrative either as potential sympathizers or her sadistic collaborators. Anguished Woman doubly comments on the state brutality as it also puts pressure on the viewer’s assumed position. 

Text by art critic Athi Mongezeleli Joja

Dumile Feni was a South African visual artist and anti-apartheid activist with African National Congress (ANC) affiliations. Often these two associations, i.e., art and politics, seem to be at odds with each other in the artist’s work. Why? This is partly because Dumile’s work never tows any expected propagandistic partisan lines or reduces itself to typical conventions of resistance art. Of course, it goes without saying his aesthetic sensibilities were largely predicated on speaking to and about the quotidian in politicized undertones. In other words, Dumile saw in the everyday the inescapability of the political in the everyday, while simultaneously glimpsing in the political, the pervasively common realities of a life lived under social duress. While the world saw in Hector Pieterson’s lifeless body, the shame and despotism of apartheid brutality that annihilated children of school going age, Dumile seems to have seen something else. Instead of focusing on the dead, he placed his visual emphasis on the living, in particular, the strong body of the other teenage boy, Mbuyisa Makhubu, carrying Pieterson’s body. Dumile not only enlarges the physicality of Makhubu, but he also typically manipulates the work’s date—that is, 1978 to 8719—to suggest a certain sense of continuity and futurity in struggle. You will ask: did the artist expect state racism go on indefinitely, and if so, why? Taken from Sam Nzima’s iconic photograph, pitched as if petitioning for global pity, Dumile re-interprets the picture to extract a temporality of fortitude and a narrative of resilience. In other words, rather than capitalizing on the narrative of sympathy alone that dominated the 1976 student protests, Dumile asks us to acknowledge the emergence of a new generation of freedom fighters. 

Text by art critic Athi Mongezeleli Joja

The sense of unease in a suited, but uncomfortably seated man, in the painting The Tenth Circle, 1994/95, illustrates very well the shift in power in South Africa after its first democratic elections in 1994. Hodgins keenly observed the lead up to the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, anticipating revelations of official criminality over five decades to be publicly acknowledged for the first time. The symbol of a hand with a hammer and the gathering gloom appearing like a storm brewing in the room highlight the rather defensive poise of the subject. Of the suit and red power tie in this work Hodgins wrote:

Is it a symbol of power or it symbolic of powerlessness without the suit? … without the suit, “I’m a little forked radish” to quote Shakespeare, but with the suit, I’m not a forked radish. I have a Position.

In Little Monster, outrage at children drafted into gangs and conflict around the world is tempered by a glimmer of grim humour in Hodgins’ treatment of “a little brat in a nappy smoking a cigar.” This work was prompted by his horror at press images of child soldiers pressed into serving in terrorist conflicts and young children corrupted in the drug trade in poverty-stricken South African communities. “I had to respond” he told this writer, “but it seemed unbearable. I needed to temper it with a little humour.” 

The origin of the phrase ‘the battle between yes and no’ can be seen in one of Kentridge’s earliest films, Vetkoek / Fête Galante (1985) where a couple embrace in front of a large drawing of the words in blue chalk, ‘THE BATTLE BETWEEN’. Each figure wears a joint mask with the words ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ drawn in charcoal, followed by a frame with the word ‘NOISE’ written on a rectangular piece of paper and censoring the words ‘YES’ and ‘NO’.

The Battle Between Yes and No in this exhibition, is one of five drawings which Kentridge based on the idea of the film scene with these words. The Battle Between Yes and No portrays not only the difference in opinion of a couple in a domestic context, but also represents the social and political differences in white South Africa just prior to the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the African National Congress. The work was drawn in the same year that F.W de Klerk called for a ‘Yes/No’ referendum in October 1989 – ‘Yes’ for social and political reform or ‘No’ to this transformation. For the first time during apartheid-rule, the whites-only electorate called for a resounding ‘Yes’. 

Kentridge also featured the subject in a large-scale colour silkscreen print (148.6 x 96.5 cm) in 1989. The link below is to the earlier film.

David Koloane (1938-2019) was born in Alexandra, Johannesburg. From 1983-1985, Koloane had a British Council scholarship and attended Birmingham Polytechnic. He later completed a diploma in Museum Studies at the University of London. 

Throughout his life, Koloane worked as an artist, writer, curator, educator and mentor to fellow artists, creating art and encouraging art-making without the usual avenues of approach. From the late 70s onwards, Koloane co-founded and helped run several major arts spaces in Johannesburg, which were committed to ensuring safe spaces for Black artists to work and share ideas. 

In 2019, the lziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town held a major survey of his work, titled A Resilient Visionary: Poetic Expressions of David Koloane. The exhibition later travelled to the Standard Bank Gallery and Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg where it was re-titled Chronicles of a Resilient Visionary. 

In Koloane’s work we see an idiosyncratic take on African expressionism take centre stage with political content and everyday urban existence coming to life in paintbrush strokes, charcoal swirls and animated video work, with Johannesburg as his primary subject matter.

In Remnants (1990) Koloane presents a tactile engagement with materials, encouraging them to produce a topographical relief structure that pulls across the canvas. Here, he transforms the surface, producing a textured chaos that invites ideas about rebirth and newness within turmoil, as seen in his later Assemblage series of the early 2000s. 

Louis Maqhubela arrived at a style of voluminous abstracted figuration in the mid-1960s after his studies at the Polly Street Art Centre, predominantly influenced by Sydney Kumalo’s sculpture, The Dancer (1965). This style pivots around Maqhubela’s earlier realistic depiction in the 1950s of Soweto township scenes, and the later pure abstract canvases of the 1970s and 80s. The use of the age-old subject matter, Saint George and the Dragon, could be ascribed to Maqhubela’s exposure to Kumalo’s early murals and sculptures for such churches in and around Johannesburg as St Peter Claver and St Martin de Porres. Religious themes often served as metaphors for early Black modernist artists, useful to depict the plight of the oppressed in apartheid South Africa, and in this case, a victory over the oppressor. Apart from benefiting from Kumalo’s teachings at Polly Street, Maqhubela was an avid reader of the numerous international art magazines available at the Centre, and he had an extensive art library of his own, including books on Paul Klee, Fernand Léger and Amedeo Modigliani. Their stylistic impact on the graphic quality of Maqhubela’s art at the time is evident. There is, however, a deep-seated African-ness evident in Maqhubela’s St George artwork: it is a veritable liberation theology visualisation of a slain apartheid dragon. 

Louis Khehla Maqhubela (1939 – 2021) joined Durant Sihlali and David Koloane in the Soweto Group of weekend artists portraying local township scenes while he was still a pupil at Orlando High School. He attended the Polly Street Art Centre in 1958, studying under Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Kumalo. During the 1960s Maqhubela was employed as a plasterer by the Head of the Housing Section of the Johannesburg municipality’s Non-European Affairs Department, decorating numerous schools in Soweto. In 1966 he won the annual Adler Fielding Gallery award for “Artists of Fame and Promise” with a work entitled Peter’s Denial (similar in style to Saint George and the Dragon), which enabled him to travel to Europe and the United Kingdom. There he met Douglas Portway, who showed him the possibilities of pure abstraction, a style he adopted in his later work. Maqhubela and his family elected to leave South Africa, moving first to Spain in 1973, later settling in London, in 1978. where he studied at Goldsmith’s and the Slade School. 

Text by Wilhelm van Rensburg, Senior Art Specialist and Head Curator at Strauss & Co.

Sebidi’s earlier works reflect her focus on the South African landscape, and its spiritual significance to South African people. These works depict rural dwellings, women tending to fields or grinding corn and children tending to livestock. Sebidi develops a painting style that is quite unique; she applies layers of brightly coloured oil paint to create a grainy texture on the surface of the painting and balances the interplay of colour as a pointillist master would. 

Her later compositions become more focused on the human figure, with surreal, mask-like faces and limbs and bodies that multiply. Sebidi warns of the effects of embracing a colonial, urban life on the spiritual integrity of indigenous South African peoples. Spirit guides often feature in her work, reminders of traditions and familial legacies that are at odds with Western modernity. Lost Human Life (2007) is a great example of her painting. The central figure is clad in traditional dress, as is the figure seated behind her, they are both painted with one blue eye and one red eye. Their differing eye colours indicate her ability to see into the spirit realm. The central figure offers a hand to the fallen figures below, to perhaps lead them back toward the traditional ways from which they have strayed.

Senegal lll (1995) is part of a series of abstract works produced during the AFRICA 95 workshop in Saint-Louis, Senegal. From South Africa, Nhlengethwa was selected to attend the workshop alongside David Koloane. This was the first workshop he attended on the African continent outside of his own country. 

The work was influenced by the surroundings in Saint-Louis and the natural colours used by fellow artists. Painting the Senegal series was also a moment which saw Nhlengethwa revisiting abstraction, a mode of expression he was exposed to at the Thupelo Workshops; a series of workshops for black artists initiated in 1985 by David Koloane and Bill Ainslie. Senegal lll was part of Nhlengethwa’s private collection. This show, therefore, presents its debut in London as well as within an exhibition context.

George Pemba was born in Korsten Village, Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. This region of South Africa saw the influx of British settlers in the 1820s, who sought to expand the English territory and suppress its Xhosa people. Pemba received a Christian education through missionary-run schools, and his father was an elder in the Presbyterian Church.

Pemba chose to live in the Eastern Cape throughout his life, travelling to Cape Town once in the 1930s and then embarking on a nationwide tour of the country and its people in the mid-1940s. He then returned to the Eastern Cape and remained there, electing both to stay in South Africa, when his contemporaries were moving abroad to live in exile, and to live outside of the capital cities and hotbeds of political upheaval.

Pemba’s artistic talent was evident from a young age, and he initially focused on the medium of watercolour. He was inspired by the French Impressionist’s skilful manipulations of vibrant colour and the immediacy of technique. His aptitude for the medium was recognised and, although he was not able to study fine art at a tertiary level due to his race, he did receive two weeks of intensive instruction in watercolour painting with and Ethyl Smith, a teacher at the University of Fort Hare, and later he studied for four months at the Rhodes University Art School under the tutelage of Winter Moore in 1936.

In 1937, the first exhibition for Black South Africans was held at Fort Hare and Pemba’s work received great acclaim, as did the work of Gerard Sekoto. It was during a trip to Cape Town in 1942 when Pemba and Sekoto discussed the merits of oil paint, and after Pemba’s trip through South Africa in 1944 he turned his attention to the medium. His subject matter reflected his interest in indigenous cultures and traditions, which had been largely suppressed by colonial rule in favour of a more “civilised”, Christian way of life. This conflict between his religious upbringing and his Xhosa heritage is alluded to in many works by the artist. The Rehearsal: Umbhorho (1987) depicts a man with a spear, animatedly addressing a group of people in a living room. A painting of a rural landscape hangs on the wall, linking the conversation in the humble interior with a rural idyll.

In her diverse practice, Penny Siopis explores the intersection of personal and public histories in South Africa. In the 1980s, Siopis produced history paintings that addressed race and gender representation in public narratives. All of Siopis’ explorations, whether with body politics, memory, migration, or the relations between the human and non-human, are characterised by her interest in what she calls the ‘poetics of vulnerability’ – embodied in the dynamic play between materiality and reference, chance and contingency, form and formlessness, personal and collective history. Paint in Siopis’ hands is a medium of sensuous and conceptual alterity, of strangeness, of otherness. The touch-oriented, sensuous intimacy of her early work, the logic of assembling readymade materials in complex spatial constellations in the history paintings and assemblages, which follow through in her later installations, can be traced to her use of paint as object, sign, and surface from her earliest creative years. Siopis’ creative affair with materiality and surface is as much an intellectual as an intuitive passion. 

Siopis sees the skin as where public and private meet. Skin is a zone of magical contamination, where metonymy and metaphor, contiguity and arbitrary signification clash and play out on a shifting, semiotic sediment of what goes before and beneath. An elemental fragility typifies skin, a vulnerability to internal or external violation, to overwhelming physical sensation. Not only is skin the largest single organ of the body, but is also its primary surface. It clothes our flesh and is the outside containing our inside. It protects and it marks us. It even stigmatises us. Siopis noted that when oil paint is built up into relief it “evokes associations with human skin and flesh, changing as it does in time, aging, wrinkling and cracking as it loses its juices”.

Siopis is a Master’s in Fine Arts graduate of Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa and holds an Honorary Doctorate from her Alma Mater. She has studied further and taught widely, in South Africa, the UK and Sweden, and is now an Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. She is widely regarded as one of the country’s most influential artists and academics.  Her work is held in many public collections and museums in SA, UK, the USA and Europe.

Cecil Skotnes was a South African artist, teacher and influential mentor. In 1952, Skotnes was appointed Cultural Relations Officer at the Polly Street Art Centre - on the border of two racially segregated suburbs in Johannesburg. Skotnes’ role was to encourage creativity and talent among young Black artists and artists of colour, who lacked opportunity and access to materials and skills development during apartheid. He sought to create an integrated environment along workshop lines where artists could exchange ideas and techniques as well as learn formal skills. He worked closely with notable colleagues including Sydney Kumalo, Lucas Sithole, Leonard Matsoso, Dumile Feni, Ezrom Legae, Durant Sihlali and briefly David Koloane. All went on to prominent careers.

Koloane chose to move away from the Western formal teaching favoured at Polly Street where the artists were advised to develop a “marketable style.” Koloane, highly respected, believed promoting the Western view worked to the detriment of genuine African style and free choice of subject. His departure influenced Skotnes and Kumalo to re-evaluate the curriculum.

Members of the Polly Street group, including Skotnes, moved away from Eurocentric practice. Durant Sihlali in an interview with Koloane, later recalled that Skotnes “went on to encourage expressive interpretation of observed objects. He and Kumalo began working from African sources … and their success had great influence on the practice of other students and colleagues.”

Skotnes shifted from painting to relief carving, woodblock printmaking, carved sculpture and using pure pigments in preference to oils. Producing prints, murals, installations, sculpture and pigment-coloured, incised panels and totems, Skotnes went on to represent South Africa at Venice and Sao Paulo Biennales.

He became acquainted with Marguerite Stephens in the 50’s and both later worked closely with Goodman Gallery. The weaver continues her practice to the present day. Skotnes’ tapestry The One-Eyed Cat is edition 1/5 by the Marguerite Stephens Tapestry Studio. Based on one of Skotnes’ best-known images - a woodcut print from 1960, it has been cited by William Kentridge as an inspiration for the cats featured in his animated films and large woodcut images.

Stephens is herself a legend in South African fine art circles. Her grand mural scale, Gobelin-style loom weavings in mohair have been made in collaboration with many and diverse artists for over sixty years. Stephens has worked in collaboration with Goodman Gallery artists including Walter Battiss, Sydney Kumalo,  Sam Nhlengethwa, Penny Siopis and since the late 1990s, extensively with William Kentridge.

Sue Williamson (b. 1941) is an acclaimed multidisciplinary artist and an accomplished writer and critic in the field of fine arts. Her family emigrated to South Africa in 1948. Trained as a printmaker, her broader practice now encompasses photography, film, drawing, sculpture, print and Installation works. Since the 1970’s the artist has engaged with social issues both during and following the times of apartheid policies in South Africa and continues to deal with ongoing struggles for true equality in the country.

Well known series of works include A Few South Africans, produced in the 1980’s, which focuses on women involved in the political struggles; and varied iterations of Messages from the Atlantic Passage, a large-scale, variable installation of shackled, suspended glass bottles engraved with details taken from 19th century slave trade documents. This installation followed a work in similar materials concerning slavery in the Cape Colony, Messages from the Moat, which featured on the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor.

Her works are held in many public collections around the world including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., Pompidou Centre, Paris, Wifredo Lam Centre, Havana and Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town.

In Spring this year, Williamson had her first solo museum show in the UK with Between Memory and Forgetting at The Box Museum, Plymouth. One month later, her two person show with Lebohang Kganye, Tell Me What You Remember opened at the Barnes Foundation in Philadephia, and her solo show Other Voices, Other Cities opens at the Centro Atlantica de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria in October. In November, she will take up an artist residency at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.

District Six: Museum Case # 9, Nile Street comes from another renowned series of works by Sue Williamson, concerning the forced removals of families of colour from District Six, near to the city centre of Cape Town. The infamous demolition and physical manhandling of people protesting the loss of their homes and banishment to newly proclaimed areas some distance from the city was a landmark act of social violence in the enforcement of the segregation of races in apartheid ruled South Africa.

Williamson gathered fragments of various household objects that had remained in the area following demolitions during the 1970's and early 1980’s and cast these fragments in small resin blocks. Named for the streets she had seen bulldozed, groups of these fragments of destroyed homes have since then, over time been encased in plexiglass vitrine-like cases, such as in District Six Museum Case #9, Nile Street, 1993 and 2023.