Cape Town artist Adele van Heerden pays close attention to complexity. As an artist and curator living in a world where the binary has been replaced by the spectrum, Van Heerden revels in the beauties of the multifarious, creating intricate pieces in ink & gouache on paper which juxtapose the natural world with human history. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, she produces finely detailed, often layered work as a personal response to the particular social, historical and political conditions she finds herself in. After graduating with a degree in Fine Arts from the Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2010, Van Heerden continued her studies at the University of South Africa, obtaining a BA in History and Politics. In 2015, she graduated from the University of Cape Town with an Honours Degree in Curatorship.

​Aimee Lindeque was born and raised on a farm in Mpumalanga, South Africa. After matriculating In 2013, she moved to Cape Town to study Fine Art at Michaelis UCT (university of Cape Town) where she majored in Sculpture and Art History. After graduating with a Bachelors in Fine Art, she became a full time artist in Cape Town. Aimee creates intricate watercolour and acrylic paintings, ink drawings, murals and illustrations. Since childhood, she has developed a deep love for Illustration and cartoons. The works of Jean Giraud and Martin Handford have had a large influence on her art. She enjoys doing studies of daily life, absorbing a wide variety of experiences and moments. Her work can be seen as a kaleidoscope of surreal imagery that references these experiences. She playfully describes her work as "Hieronymus Bosch meets where’s Wally".

Painter and printmaker Aviwe Plaatje uses portraiture to explore the world around him. Working primarily with oil painting and the relief printing technique of linocut, he renders people from his community. Often, his compositions meld portraiture with abstract patterns and expressive colors. His intricate, multi-layered linocuts use the medium’s propensity towards texture to create uniquely expressive portraits. “I very much like the way you can record an instant observation or doodle away your unconscious thoughts and ideas,” Plaatje has said. “In my artwork I document scenes I come across in day-to-day life. My inspiration comes from the world around me, I love absorbing my surroundings. I simply comment on life.” His uniquely expressive portraits and his play with patterns recalls other Black figurative artists including Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kehinde Wiley, and Barkley L. Hendricks.

Claude Chandler is a Cape Town-based artist with a N.Diploma in Fine Arts who works out of SideTrack Studios, which he also manages. His work consists of large abstract portraits created using his unique 'stamp' technique, which involves using stamps of his own design to create intricate, textured patterns on his canvases. Chandler has participated in numerous art fairs, both locally and abroad, and is inspired by digital technologies and the ways in which we perceive the world through screens and lenses. His work revolves around the concept of 'ways of seeing,' exploring the illusions of the digital self/avatar and commenting on the impact of technology on our daily lives. Through his art, Chandler invites viewers to question their own perceptions and to contemplate the relationship between the self and the digital world. His work has been featured in several exhibitions and has garnered critical acclaim for its innovative approach and powerful imagery. Overall, Chandler is an accomplished artist with a unique style and a commitment to exploring the intersections of art, technology, and human experience.

Concerned with issues such as overpopulation and fast-growing cities, Elske probes the loss and search for the human soul in the urbanized world. She responds to these issues through 2D (mixed media paintings, drawings, etchings), 3D (sculptures) and animated media. She explains her art path: “I used the 2020 lockdown to finish my art degree - after a long career in pharmacy and business consulting. These sound very black-and-white, but I love thinking out of the box. So, I use a variety of creative media to probe concepts showing how we are individual and universal at the same time. I try to steer clear of fixed materials and techniques. “As a city dweller I am specifically intrigued by urban experiences - and how these affect our soul. This has taken me down a rabbit hole, from looking at construction sites and cranes, to comparing ants with urban communities. I have gained huge respect for ants’ communal enterprise and societal structures, and especially for their instinctive intellect. Although mostly overthinking and chasing conceptual art, I am secretly pursuing creative joy.” Beginning 2022, ants started to populate Elske’s work. While symbolising our human-urban communities, the ants expose our tendency towards individualism as opposed to the common good. The artist’s intention is for the ant-references to challenge our anthropocentrism (human exceptionalism). She explains: “As human animals we are clearly not the superior species we like to believe we are. Where we have developed intellectually, ants have evolved intuitive intelligence. We can learn from the evolutionary strengths of these and other sentient beings.” In her vision of future cities, Elske Henderson looks at the ways in which urbanization has affected and will continue to affect us. Using references from the construction industry - cranes, skyscrapers, scaffolding - her work illuminates our repetitive patterns of construction and destruction. Her materials - including building rubble, cement, mortar and paint made from discarded metals - are related to the concept she is exploring. In summary: “Art makes the connection between the five senses and my heart - creativity is my life pulse.”

Frances White is a contemporary artist and designer living in Cape Town, South Africa. Born in KwaZulu Natal and raised in Johannesburg. Frances majored in English literature, history of art and painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. Frances plays with the boundary between art and design, drawing on influences of Pop Art, and pattern, fabric and surface design, ultimately constructing her own distinctive style. Her fascination with the interplay of colours and strong graphic shapes is under-pinned by a mastery of traditional media like oil on canvas, and oil on board, elements which are in strong contrast with the contemporary nature of her work. Her work in enamel, glitter, reflective and hologramic vinyls and surfaces, tries to capture her fascination with light, and how it refracts, reflects and prisms into colour.

James Labuschagne explores human subjectivity through portraiture and employs a thoroughly studied and technically rigorous approach to painting and drawing. The subjects of his work range from traditional portraits rendered from life, allegorical depictions of the artist himself as well as referencing digitally sourced images and collage. James aims to examine how we understand portraiture at a time when we interact with both our own faces and those of others in progressively abstracted and mediated ways. His work grapples with how our visual experience grows increasingly distorted and deranged in a digitised and alienated world, working with traditional methods that position themselves at odds with a culture obsessed with efficiency and relentless acceleration. James has taught and exhibited internationally, previously living and working between the United States and Europe. He is currently based in Cape Town and is a resident artist at Sidetrack Studios.

I paint landscapes and portraits to hold onto a moment in time, to feel present, to celebrate being alive, and to connect each of us to what is deep within us. I paint en plein air (in the open air, outdoors) and from life. My style is expressive, bold, quick – often because this is exactly what is required to capture the fast-changing light and quickly moving clouds. I am captivated by my natural environment and the endless challenge to render in paint the beauty I see around me. I apply my academic training to bring realism to my paintings, yet I leave plenty of space for bright, unexpected colours, and stylised shapes to bring out the essence of my subjects. Art for me is like a mirror to existence. Art causes me to feel, validates and contains my feelings, gives me a sense of belonging in this world, and helps me understand my place. I aim for my art to bring this sense of presence and connection to others, as we share in our human experience ​I have recently returned to Cape Town, the city of my birth, after studying for three years at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy. Prior to this, I lived and worked in New York, London and Singapore, pursuing a corporate career in Change Management and Human Resources, before committing to my true passion – celebrating nature and people with canvas, brushes and oils.

Karen Wykerd is a Cape Town-based artist who works across a range of media. Using embroidery and painting - on canvas, paper or glass – she combines dissolution with detail to express her ongoing fascination with everyday city life. From her easel she explores both urban and natural environments, constantly in pursuit of light. Her endless search takes her down busy streets, forest paths and high above the city. Captured first in photography and then in pigment or thread, her understated scenes are defined and transformed by light. Each individual brushstroke or stitch reveals the ever-evolving interaction between sunlight and shadow. For Wykerd, a city is a place whose energy materialises in the meeting point of such dualities - concrete and trees, grids and the flow of water, rhythm and stillness, control and chance. Process is an important part of the work. While Wykerd’s considered mark-making is meditative, the slow layering of brushstrokes, combined with translucent washes of soft colour, allow her to depict light in all its changing qualities. There are also elements of serendipity at play, acknowledging the necessity of exploring the unfamiliar in order to gain insight. Wykerd’s work is a quiet reverie. Whether she depicts a dappled pool, a shaded street or golden beach, the muted scenes she captures are calm oases amid the distractions of contemporary living. Her translucent washes of verdant colour around figures swimming, strolling and floating create scenes of immersion in nature. By including such figures in her work, she invites her audience to share her vision. The dreamily indistinct backgrounds and tranquil palette combine to give us moments of rest and reflection where we can be reacquainted with nature, and our selves.

Kate (b. 1993, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa) is a Cape Town-based visual artist. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from the University of Stellenbosch (SU) in 2018. She attained a Master’s degree in Visual Art from the same institution in 2021. During her time as a student, she worked as an intern for SMAC Gallery and then as a teaching assistant in the printmaking department at SU. Kate is known for her organic, plant-inspired paintings and drawings, influenced by her love of nature and peaceful surroundings. Her ‘foliagescapes’ reflect her fascination with botanical art while also functioning as an expression of the uplifting, calming, and reassuring qualities inherent within nature. Kate’s art seeks to bring contentment and tranquillity to the viewer. By utilising soothing colours and constructing harmonious, balanced compositions, she aims to create artworks that invite the viewer inward into a mindset of quiet contemplation. More recently, her work explores the theme of the forest: a space, both real and imagined, that forms the backdrop of many stories in literary fiction. Kate is concerned with the play of mark-making, colour, illusion, depth, and the perception that this creates in the eye of the viewer.

As an artist, I am constantly exploring new ways to depict that which I believe in and connect with in the most honest way possible. I trust that the viewer will experience something when looking at work that was created with passion, but also with context that is personal to the artist. This is the power of art.

I am a Fine Artist working mainly in oils and alcohol ink. My point of origin is my place as a young, white, Afrikaans-speaking female in post-colonial, post-Apartheid South Africa. I have been sheltered in my parents’ middle-class, suburban home in Randburg, Johannesburg. As I have ventured outside this privilege I was born into, I am frequently challenged to question my identity and the advantages I have been afforded. Family photographs are the source material for many of my paintings. They are snapshots of the joyous experiences and memorable moments of my parents and grandparents from the 1930s to the early 1990s. I return to these images with difficulty as they resemble the memories and histories of many Afrikaner families during the Apartheid years. Documented moments of joy that appear to disregard political and social wrongs of the time. ​In post-Apartheid South Africa, I feel that many white, Afrikaans-speaking people need rehabilitation. I, therefore, use my art to explore the past and present to reconcile the privilege of my birth, and the pride and love for my heritage, with being a truly South African in our new democracy.

My studio practice is centered around experimentation and the invention of spaces. In the studio I make, test, play and push around materials, colour and forms. All these collages, 3-d objects and scraps of studio detritus along with numerous images of fashion, interiors and art end up scattered on the studio floor. I look to these images and non-images to trigger chance happenings in my paintings. As I paint I deliberately make a mess and then try and fix it.

Selvin November (b. 1969) was born in, and still lives and works in Cape Town. He completed a Diploma in Art and Design at Cape Technikon and was awarded a three-month residency on Robben Island in 1996. His latest solo exhibitions were The Portrait Speaks at the AVA Gallery in Cape Town in 2008 and Young, Free and Single, as the Festival Artist at the University of Stellenbosch Woordfees 2019. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions - the most recent being a group show at the AVA gallery, entitled, Salon Cape Town, in 2018

Robyn Pretorius started her art journey from a young age but only after a career shift committed herself to become a full-time artist and invested more time in art research. This encouraged her to create a significant body of work which would introduce her into the local art industry. Since then she has landed her first solo exhibition in 2016 at Youngblood Gallery and extended her reach in the local art industry. Her art practice has shown commitment to the local art scene but has also reached the international audience with exhibitions in New York and Europe. She attended her first art residency at Glo’art, Global Art Centre in Belgium in 2018. This experience allowed her to experiment, explore and refine her practice. Today, Robyn Pretorius has grown tremendously as a local emerging artist and uses her art to uplift and convey a narrative which is greatly inspired by her community and personal experiences.

Tanja Truscott’s artwork is born from a fascination with painterly abstraction and the power it has to engage us visually and emotionally. She works intuitively and is inspired by sounds and sensations from the outdoors ... or just as easily by literature, poetry and music. Any of these can be the impetus for the colours and tools she chooses, the marks made and the shapes that emerge. Born in the Netherlands but now living and working in Cape Town, Truscott received a BA in Graphic Design from the University of Stellenbosch in 1984 and a Diploma in Secondary Teaching in 1990 from the University of Cape Town. She has taught art and after many years spent in educational publishing as an illustrator, graphic designer and art director, she turned to painting full time in 2015. Truscott’s most recent group exhibitions in Cape Town (2019) include Secret Garden at Art-on-Avenues and Nano 1.3 at the Barnard Gallery. Her work is represented in private collections both locally and abroad.

Inspired by day to day events and memories of people, Thabiso works from varied disciplines. Born in 1994, to a Venda father and Ndebele mother, the artist has practised art professionally in Johannesburg and abroad for nearly a decade, and has taken part in numerous group exhibitions and two solo shows in 2021 and 2022 respectively. His work has become prized collections in South Africa and the world. And he has been featured in 2020 in The Art Times Magazine and SABC’s Mzansi Insider among other notable mentions. His recent work reconciles different aspects, components, and features of the self. From the personality projected to the outside world, to the segments known only to ourselves, his works tend to illustrate and represent different parts of our nature, our character, our ego, and our temperament. Mimicking the unprecedented rhythm of the sea, Thabiso Dakamela takes us through different factions of his own personality traits through the depiction of various persona’s that can be found in a specific locale. In this body of work, Dakamela creates expressive reflections of the vibrations and energies he encounters and notes the inextricable interconnectedness of all living beings. Dakamela further notes the duality of life as he puts into perspective and contrasts light reflected in emotions such as joy, bliss, freedom, and contentment with the darker aspects of life such as guilt, pain, insecurities, and fear. Noting this, Dakamela advocates for the acknowledgment and balance of the two polarities of light and dark in attempts to centralize and ground oneself in the end and flow of life. Evocative of the eternal nature of the ocean, Dakamela predominantly uses shades of blue to explore notions of self- awareness, learning, spirituality, strength, and vulnerability and to express further the importance of introspective solitude balanced out with the amiable effect of companionship