.jpg)
From iconic public artworks (discover a few of our favourites) and interesting street art to established galleries and museums, trailblazing indie spaces, and the hardworking artists' studios in the City Centre, Johannesburg is a city for art lovers. We update this guide weekly to help you navigate the ever-changing array on offer, with a curated selection of solo and group shows, artist-led walkabouts, workshops, guided tours, and other art-related events worth your while.
For a full guide to what’s on in Joburg, explore our events calendar. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter published every Thursday morning. For extra daily updates, follow our Instagram page.
Keyes Art Night on Thu, Nov 7 from 17:00
It's the first Thursday of November and there's no better place to be than the vibrant Keyes Art Mile for Keyes Art Night, sponsored by American Express. Painter and sculptor Samurai Farai brings a new body of work to Origin Art, pulling on the threads of his heritage. The Africa Salon comes to Gallery 1 with 12 artists on show and a jam-packed programme. In a solo show at BKhz Gallery, Athi-Patra Ruga continues his legacy of myth-making as a contemporary response to South Africa's colonial history. Meanwhile, in the Atrium, little artists put on a big show with Pieces of Our Dream.
Get the full Keyes Art Night line-up here.
Strauss & Co's pre-auction exhibition
Until Mon, Nov 11 – You'll find all the big names in art (and a few delightful surprises) at Strauss & Co's four-part auction series, held over two days in Joburg on Mon, Nov 11 and Tue, Nov 12. Browse the catalogues and register to bid here.
Even for those who don't plan on bidding, the pre-sale exhibition in Houghton is a must-see before these phenomenal, museum-grade works disappear into private collections. From a monumental piece by Edoardo Villa to whimsical work by the Everard Group of women artists spanning four generations, there's much to linger over. We picked out 12 unusual works or collections to look out for in Strauss & Co's November 2024 exhibition. Discover the stories behind them, here.
More art highlights
Until Fri, Nov 15 – Phumulani Ntuli's solo exhibition Umfanekiso Uyopha Inkungu (An Image Oozes Mist) is an exceptional exploration of the merging of traditional printmaking methods with digital techniques. Featuring large-scale, mixed-media collages on canvas and a stop-motion animation video, Ntuli's work presents reconfigured and fragmented archival images of significant historical figures in South Africa. With his art, he questions the nature of archives and explores the politics of image-making. His ultimate aim is to decontextualise images so that the story they tell is interrupted, and the viewer is invited to reconsider the narrative at hand.Join a workshop exploring the making of the artist's prints on Sat, Nov 9. RSVP here.
Until Thu, Nov 21 – Works on Paper at 44 Stanley's the gallery is all about the dynamic, wonderfully personal relationship between the artist, the medium, and the surface. Stephen Allwright, Deborah Bell, Janet Mbirimi, and more join in this exploration. "Each artist has a unique connection with their chosen surface, particularly with paper – one of the most unassuming and universal foundations for creating," reads the curatorial statement. From tissues to disposable containers, bags, and newspapers, we encounter paper in various forms every day. When it's used for the purposes of art, however, paper becomes more than an ephemeral, throwaway object. "It's a repository for ideas, a place for transitions, and even a symbol of absence."
Until Fri, Dec 6 – Zimbabwe-born artist Raymond Fuyana trained as a printmaker at the Artist Proof Studio, but as a painter he's self-taught. The visual realm is especially charged for Fuyana, who is hearing impaired. In his surreal, mind-bending works the artist employs his own personal colour coding, while motifs around fantasy, technology, and the environment are regular fixtures. Beyond the Board is his first solo exhibition with Guns & Rain.
Attend an artist-led walkabout with Fuyana on Sat, Nov 23.
Until Sat, Dec 7 – Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation's (JCAF) annual exhibition explores the natural world and our place in it. From Ernesto Neto's deep sea-inspired installation to Ximena Garrido-Lecca's growing garden in the gallery, Ecospheres is a trip through the Global South that brings diverse cultures and ideas together. It's a useful accompaniment to thinking through our place in the world, particularly regarding stewardship and living together for the mutual benefit of all. What is refreshing is that no hard and fast answers are offered up – only ample space to explore. Read our reflections on Ecospheres here.
We loved our guided tour of this thoughtful curatorial project and can't recommend a viewing enough. By appointment only; make your booking here.
Until Fri, Dec 13 – Prolific Pretoria-born, Cape Town-based artist Zander Blom shares a new body of work in a solo at Stevenson gallery. With a dramatic painting dripping in front of the artist's busy studio space, seeing the title shot for Blom's exhibition, Monochrome Paintings, makes one wish you could view the works in situ. Though that's kind of the magic of Blom's work anyhow – his style is so distinct, and his works so process-driven, that you can't help but get swept up in his world. It's heavy black meets stark white and chaos meets order in these abstract, evocative paintings.
Until Jan 26, 2025 – Human connection, play, poetry, and curiosity are central to Odette Graskie's philosophy, as well as her creative process. We see this in Side Quest, a new body of work from the artist exhibited at Berman Contemporary, one of the galleries at 223 Jan Smuts Creative Hub. The exhibition is an ode to uncertainty, with Graskie saying, "Within the making process, all the work felt like me trying to answer a different question every time, each work leading to more and more questions. The tunnels, the embroidery, the hanging paper works are diaphanous, each one more see-through than the previous. [...] These pieces, while separate, thread together in this space and become site-specific attempts at embracing the light and the location."
Until Mar 2025 – Off the back of his 2023 FNB Art Prize win, photographic artist Lindokuhle Sobekwa's solo exhibition Umkhondo: Going Deeper comes to Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG). In this exhibition, two significant and interconnected bodies of work – namely I carry Her photo with Me and Ezilalini (The Country) – unite under the banner of introspection and discovery, as Sobekwa navigates profound personal loss and grapples with his sense of belonging.
"Photography is a powerful tool," says the artist. "It has enabled me to share the realities of smaller, more intimate narratives that project onto the larger map that is South African history." The storytelling potential of photography is central to the work of Sobekwa, who documents experiences as a form of excavation. He stitches together fragments of memory in a quest to unravel the mysteries of the past, and to find comfort and closure. Read our interview with Sobekwa here.
Until Mar 2025 – What does it mean to be "born free" in South Africa? Dutch photographer Ilvy Njiokiktjien's solo exhibition Born Free: Generation of Hope at the Apartheid Museum is a visual narrative of the past three decades in South Africa, since the dawn of our democracy in 1994. Through Njiokiktjien's lens, we encounter an intimate portrayal of the first generation to grow up after apartheid rule. It's a poignant body of work that delves into the promise of a "rainbow nation", dealing equally with hope and disillusionment.
Until Apr 2025 – What do you get following an intense artistic engagement with a scientific subject – the 2.5–2.8-million-year-old Taung skull, which was discovered in 1924? Joni Brenner's solo exhibition at Origins Centre, Impact, encapsulates her long-term creative reckoning with the skull, broadly exploring themes of "fragility and survival, destruction and creation, uncertainty, loss, pressure, and chance". Unusual, beautiful, and thought-provoking are a few more words that come to mind when describing Brenner's response to this ancient piece of the story of human evolution.
Join one of two walkabouts with Brenner on Sat, Nov 9 at 10:00 and 14:00. Entrance to Origins Centre is R60 p.p. (or R30 p.p. for students). RSVP with tammy.hodgekiss@wits.ac.za.
Closing soon
Until Sat, Nov 9 – In a series of luscious, layered paintings, Athi-Patra Ruga creates avatars that probe the influence of historical tropes on agency and representations of black masculinities. "I welcome you to a part-speculative, part-historical frontier in which complex notions of collaboration and conflict between settler and native, coloniser and colonised are reflected in the sartorial choices of my avatars," says the artist of his solo Amadoda on the Verge… [1835–2025] at BKhz Gallery.Ruga's lone avatars appear to be on the verge of something curious and uncharted. The uneasiness of the "frontier", both as a physical and psychological limit, as well as a threshold for new opportunities, fascinates him. "The dark history of settler occupation and religious domination has inspired me to focus on the continued effects of disembodiment on the black male body," Ruga explains. "Using costume and craftsmanship, I want to create a remedy, an alternative to a history of loss and disassociation."
Until Mon, Nov 11 – Step into a mythical world of ruby onyinyechi amanze's own making with the solo exhibition Light Blue Violet at Goodman Gallery. Born in Nigeria, the British-American artist adopts the role of choreographer with this body of work, intentionally positioning her signature cast of characters and structural elements on to paper surfaces and within the exhibition space.
"Amanze imagines the space in her drawings as rooms that can be physically entered," reads the exhibition text. "Figures and objects occupy these rooms in compositions that skew and call into question an assumed perspective. Although minor in their individual capacity, the effect of these smaller shifts produce a cumulative disorientation/reorientation. The disruption in the plane of the drawing spills out into how the artworks interact within the exhibition space."
Until Tue, Nov 12 – The result of Occupying the Gallery's recent collaboration with David Krut Workshop, the group show Reclaiming Quarters presents new works on paper by Mary Sibande, Lusanda Ndita, and Hoek Swaratlhe. Held at David Krut's The Blue House gallery space, the exhibition delves into the notion of "quarters" as a potent symbol of spatial control enacted against people of colour during apartheid South Africa. "Through each artist’s unique lens, the works presented transform these spaces of oppression into sites of memory, resistance, and possibility," reads the exhibition text. Read our #MyJoburg interview with Mary Sibande, a trailblazing South African artist, here.
Save the date
Opening Tue, Nov 19 at 18:00 – We loved seeing Esther Mahlangu's major retrospective Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting at Iziko Museums in Cape Town. Good news for Joburg: it's travelling to Wits Art Museum (WAM) for an extended run.
Comments