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From iconic public artworks (discover a few of our favourites), interesting street art, established galleries and museums to 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.
Art night out: What's on at Keyes (Thu, Feb 6 from 17:00)
It's the first Thursday of February, which means the galleries at Keyes Art Mile are open till late. Painter and sculptor Samurai Farai's excellent solo Masks of Modernity continues its run at Origin Art, pulling on the threads of his heritage. Plus, the gallery hosts its monthly Unlocking Your Collection event for art steals, with nothing over R5,000. At the entrance to the Annex space, you'll find an interactive artwork by Cameron-Lee Olivier, while the new art kids on the block bring their work to the Atrium in the graduate showcase, The Kids These Days Vol. 3.
For the full Keyes Art Night line-up, see our guide here.
Exhibition openings and artist walkabouts (Thu, Feb 6 – Wed, Feb 12)
Opening Thu, Feb 6 at 17:00 – Ada-Ruth Kellow believes it's time for us to "look at simple carrots afresh". The figurative painter's solo exhibition The Vegetarian treads the line between playfulness and profundity, presented by Lizamore & Associates in Niche Cafe at Workshop17 Firestation, Rosebank. Kellow uses art to confront and to console, and, sometimes, to gently tease. "I am an observer of society, and nothing intrigues me more than my fellow humans," she says. Read our #MyJoburg interview with Kellow here.
Walkabout on Sat, Feb 8 at 10:00 – Simphiwe Ndzube's solo iNtwasahlobo at Stevenson takes its title from the isiXhosa word for 'spring'. The exhibition statement reads: "The magical-realist pastoral scenes are rendered in vivid, even lurid tones, and are populated by enigmatic figures verging on the grotesque." The female figures in Ndzube's paintings are restful and contemplative, shown watering plants, tending to soil, or smoking a traditional pipe. While the artist's previous exhibition dealt with the complexities of a nation contending with freedom, this series – while not without its shadows – exemplifies the necessary reflection that follows periods of tension.
Opening Sat, Feb 8 – Two new group exhibitions open at Berman Contemporary (on the top floor of 223 Creative Hub). Curated by Kamogelo Walaza, Through Form and Meaning invites us to consider the materiality of art not as static, but as a "living extension of the human condition" through a fascinating series of highly tactile works. Meanwhile, Ke Rona (derived from the Sesotho word for 'we are') looks at Afro-surrealism through the medium of photography – comprising a collection of staged and unstaged photographs that tread the line between truth and suggestion.
More art highlights
Until Fri, Feb 28 – Migration Through Borderless Light is the title of Wayne Barker's solo at Everard Read. These new works were "made in his garden at the edge of nowhere". It's all very evocative. Writes Sean O'Toole: "Barker is a bit Claude Monet, whose late paintings – liquid abstractions that dissolve visible experience into sensory colour – Barker has seen in person and greatly admires. Much like this vaunted ancestor, Barker’s paintings do not simply replicate the beauty of his surroundings but translates it, channelling its energy into bold, feverish compositions. Painting is an occult practice, an alchemical transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. For anyone doubting this, just look at Wayne Barker’s new paintings."
Until Fri, Feb 28 – At Strauss & Co's Houghton showroom, see a rare exhibition of wares from Kalahari Studio drawn from a private collection. Founded by Aleksanders Klopcanovs and Elma Vestman, the studio's sculptures, vases, and wall plaques feature figurative motifs from San rock art, local fauna and flora, and geometric patterns inspired by Zulu beadwork.
Until Fri, Feb 28 – It's all about the power of dress and remembrance with the installation series Fashion Accounts at Museum Africa. This thought-provoking showcase is a response to the relative absence of black South African fashion histories within museum collections. The rituals of collecting, archiving, memorialising, and resisting through fashion are explored, contrasting Museum Africa's rich ethnographic collection of items and images capturing the country's people, places, and history with clothing from the Bernberg Costumes & Textiles Collection of mostly European and white-owned items from the mid-1700s to the early 2000s. Contemporary artists and collectives working within the realm of fashion, Thebe Magugu, Sindiso Khumalo, The Sartists, and Ncumisa 'Mimi' Duma, also have work in this exhibition.
Until Feb 28 – A curatorial project by the House of African Feminisms, Abafa(ba)zi – Those Who Die Knowing at Goethe-Institut unpacks the role of black women as custodians of stories and preservers of knowledge. The collaborative group showcase includes commissioned works and artistic experiments, as well as existing works by transdisciplinary artists and researchers from Africa. "This exhibition highlights the ways in which women have served as conduits of knowledge in ordinary settings and communities; it also positions us (black women) as preservers of our own narratives," reads the curatorial statement. The agency of African women and the qualities of femininity, imagination, and innovation present in African societies are celebrated in Abafa(ba)zi.
Until Sun, Mar 2 – Sophia van Wyk's mixed-media solo exhibition Love Default at the NIROX Covered Space (one of the galleries in the sprawling NIROX Sculpture Park) explores the complex behaviours we perform in intimate relationships, charting the spectrum all the way from affection to dysfunction. Homer’s Odyssey, existentialist philosophy, and pop psychology all find their way into Van Wyk's art practice. We spot a bit of Nieu-Bethesda outsider artist Helen Martins and her Owl House in there, too. "My attempt to find form is also an attempt to find meaning," says Van Wyk.
Until Thu, Mar 20 – A solo by multidisciplinary Joburg-based practitioner William Kentridge, To Cross One More Sea at Goodman Gallery, meditates on themes of exile, return, and the artist's place in the world. Expect drawings, works on paper, small sculptures, puppets, and film – in true Kentridge style. A part historical, part fictional film projected across three screens gives this exhibition its title, and gets its African debut in this show. Two colourful, large-scale sculptures from Kentridge's Paper Procession series are erected outside the gallery.
Until Apr 2025 – We loved seeing Esther Mahlangu's major retrospective Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting at Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town. The solo is now at Wits Art Museum (WAM) for an extended run. Thanks to her marvellous skill and ability to carry her heritage and culture forward, Mahlangu is an icon in the local art world. She has been painting since the age of 10, learning from her mother, grandmother, and women in her hometown of Mthambothini village in Mpumalanga. Colourful and geometric, her work honours the symbolic and visual language of traditional Ndebele art. Mahlangu celebrated her 89th birthday on Nov 11, 2024. Her retrospective exhibition is a survey of her wide-ranging and in-depth work over the years.
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 child's 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.
Through the lens: three photography exhibitions
Until Sun, Mar 23 – Off the back of his 2023 FNB Art Prize win, photographic artist Lindokuhle Sobekwa's solo exhibition Umkhondo: Going Deeper shows at 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 Mon, Mar 31 – Thokoza-based photography initiative Of Soul and Joy presents a group exhibition, I Put My Hand On My Chest To Feel My Heartbeat, at Constitution Hill. It's a chance to see work by 16 of the programme's current and former students, who share their views on life in Thokoza – from personal narratives to community stories.
Until Mon, Mar 31 – 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.
Save the date
Sat, Feb 15 from 09:00 – 12:00 – By popular demand, an exhibition of little-known early Joburg portrait photographer Sara Buijskes opens to the public for a second showing at Rand Club in association with the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation. Read about these remarkable works here and book your tickets here.
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