Looking Back, Seeing Now gathers a remarkable constellation of South African modernist artists, figures who shaped new ways of seeing amid profound political and cultural upheaval. Their work spans decades, from the early 20th century through apartheid’s long shadow and into the uneasy hopefulness of its decline. This is not a simple timeline, but a layered journey through how artists wrestled with questions of identity, place, and possibility in a changing world.

Rather than treating modernism as a fixed style or historical moment, the exhibition opens it up as a space of movement and exchange. Here, figuration and abstraction intersect. European traditions meet African resurgence. The bustle of the street is held alongside private, inner worlds. The bold vision of Irma Stern and Cecily Sash, the lyrical humanity of Gerard Sekoto, and the dreamlike intensity of Alexis Preller sit alongside Nel Erasmus and Louis Maqhubela’s formal experimentation, George Pemba and Ephraim Ngatane’s emotionally charged realism, and the measured elegance of Dorothy Kay and Maurice van Essche.

Many of these artists created under pressure—some in exile, others in quiet defiance. What they shared was a commitment to making visible the fractured, urgent reality of South Africa’s modernity. Together, their work forms a collective portrait of resilience, imagination, and the power of art to hold memory and shape change.

This exhibition asks us to reconsider what modernism looked like from this part of the world—and what it might still mean when we look again, from here, in the present.

Artist list

Battiss, Walter Wahll

Cattaneo, Guiseppe

Cilliers-Barnard, Bettie

Coetzee, Christo

Everard-Haden, Ruth

Hodgins, Robert Griffiths

Krenz, Alfred Frederic Franz

Laubscher, Erik Frederick Bester Howard

Legae, Ezrom Kgobokanyo Sebata

Ngatane, Ephraim

Pemba, George

Pierneef, Jacob Hendrik

Preller, Alexis

Sash, Cecily

Sekoto, Gerard

Sibiya, Lucky Madlo

Skotnes, Cecil Edwin Frans

Stern, Irma

Sumner, Maud Frances Eyston

van der Wat, Hannatjie

Van Essche, Maurice Charles Louis

Villa, Edoardo