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 highlights
Opening Wed, Jan 22 from 17:00 – Migration Through Borderless Light is the title of Wayne Barker's solo at Everard Read, new works "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."
Fri, Jan 24 from 17:30 – Two hundred prints unearthed at a Mossel Bay antique shop have brought the work of a pioneering Joburg portrait photographer Sara Buijskes to the fore. Despite her career spanning decades in the 1900s, working from a studio at the Barbican, she remains relatively unknown in the local canon. A rare, one-day-only exhibition of her work at Rand Club, organised by the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation, seeks to change that. South African photo historian Carol Hardijzer will talk about Buijskes' life and legacy at the event. Book your tickets here.
Opening Sat, Jan 25 – 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.
Sat, Jan 25 from 10:00 – Attend the open studio of Rhona Mühlebach and Chloë Reid, artists in residence at NIROX Sculpture Park. Together, they're developing a script and series of drawings for an installation-based performance, Neither Hideous nor Tedious, that explores the relationships between mythology and personhood. You'll get to see how the process works and watch a rehearsal. RSVP with zanele@niroxarts.com.
Until Sat, Feb 1 – In his mixed-media solo exhibition Masks of Modernity at Keyes Art Mile's Origin Art gallery, Samurai Farai explores his dual heritage – Zimbabwean and Afrikaans – to uncover the complexities of hybridisation and cultural legacy. It's a poignant theme in a country like South Africa, where these kinds of dualities are part of so many of our identities. "With a deliberate homage to ancestral ties and a heartfelt celebration of hybridity, Farai bridges the ancient and the modern by channelling inspiration from historical African civilisations. His sculptures, crafted from Zimbabwean stone in reverence to Shona masterful sculpting traditions, breathe life into his paintings' characters, embodying them in three-dimensional form," reads the curatorial statement.
Until Sat, Feb 22 – If you were to ask self-taught artist and photographer Mame-Diarra Niang, the landscape of self is ever-changing territory. "You do not know yourself; you know points and some intervals," she writes. In her fourth solo with Stevenson, titled Æther, Niang focuses on the abstraction of the inner self, articulating how it evolves within spaces of resistance, uncertainty, and flux.
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 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 – We loved seeing Esther Mahlangu's major retrospective Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting at Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town. Good news for Joburg: the solo travels to 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.
Closing soon
Until Sun, Jan 26 – Two solos and a group exhibition come to the end of their run at 223 Jan Smuts Creative Hub this weekend. Downstairs at Candice Berman Gallery, Solomon Omogboye's solo ILÉ (THIS IS HOME) revolves around the theme of belonging. At Berman Contemporary, Odette Graskie's body of work for Side Quest explores human connection, play, and poetry. Join one of two closing walkabouts with Graskie on Sat, Jan 26 at 10:00 and 12:00. Also upstairs, eight diverse female artists celebrate the season as part of the group showcase, Summer Muse.
Save the date
Thu, Jan 30 from 17:30 – Head to Strauss & Co for the launch of Close and Far, a publication unpacking Karel Nel's curious, far-reaching art practice. Plus, be among the first to watch a new documentary starring Nel titled Ruminations. RSVP here.
Sat, Feb 1 and Sat, Feb 8 from 11:00 – 14:00 – David Krut's The Blue House gallery kicks off its programme for the year with Bevan de Wet's paper pulp paintings in the solo titled Surface Tension. Opening the following week, prints by performance artist Oupa Sibeko, created on a metal plate while wearing ice skates, form the solo To See Them Home.
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