Just as lithography relies on the interplay
of layers to create depth on a two-dimensional surface, Frier's art reveals complex narratives
through the juxtaposition of historical and contemporary elements. Both processes demand a
careful negotiation of balance and transparency, resulting in works that are not only visually
compelling but rich with embedded meaning, revealing a nuanced engagement with identity,
heritage, and evolving cultural experiences.

Lucinda Mudge has an intimate relationship with failure. As a ceramicist, her chosen medium is fragile by nature, and prone to fracture. Sudden changes in temperature in her kiln can cause her large-scale vases to crack, crumble or collapse, rendering months of hard work futile.

In Mudge’s love affair with ceramics, this crazing of clay is akin to heartbreak. It can start slowly – small cracks appearing and spreading, familiar patterns disintegrating, once-bright hues fading into oblivion – or it can all fall apart without warning. “It’s a brutal choice of material,” says the artist, and, like love, it can bring both great joy and great misery.

Ahead of the 12th edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair (21-23 February 2025), The Art Momentum met with the 10 artists selected for the SOLO section.

Addressing this year’s theme, ‘Playscapes: Shaping Worlds and Selves’, each of the artists’ works reveal the creative, imaginative, and transformative power of Play and its resonance on our lives and environments.

Drawing from her memories of three years spent in Kenya as a child, Sassen has continued to travel and work there throughout her life. Using this evocative realm of intense colour and textures as her inspiration, her work is rich with references that allow for layered interpretations. At the core of her practice is an understanding of the importance of consistent experimentation. As a result, Sassen’s images are complex and quietly disarming. Her works are often a dialogue between various elemen...

Under immense pressure, minerals in the earth do that seemingly inexplicable thing where they turn into gleaming geodes, crystallising into sharp facets of brilliant colour that seem at oddswith the harsh conditions under which they were created.

Interdisciplinary artist Rosie Mudge is no stranger to this kind of juxtaposition. In Under Pressure, her second solo with SMAC Gallery, Mudge presents a series of large-scale paintings and smaller works on paper that employ her characteristic glitteri...

Some of the country’s most famous examples, photographers who have made their living in the grey area between article and aesthetic, are David Goldblatt and Zanele Muholi. Linked through their activism and political engagement, both artists have sought to unearth certain truths through their representations of everyday people. Where Goldblatt’s activism is quieter, inherent in his subject matter, Muholi’s activism is overt, radical.
Arguably South Africa’s most wellknown photographer, David Gold...

There is a quietness as I enter the room. Eleven sets of sombre monochrome eyes gaze at me from the pristine white walls of the Barnard Gallery, Cape Town. The earthy realism of the large-scale portraits is rendered in muted shades with infusions of rich blue, red, and yellow; a distinct departure from Robert Slingsby’s trademark abstraction, vivid palette, and intricate symbolism.

From observations of daily life, to dense arrangements of distinctively symbolic characters, Richard Mudariki’s Open Agenda (2014) is a coalescence of diurnal rhythms and critical considerations.

Currently showing at Brundyn+, Cape Town, ‘commute with intuitive instinct’ is a collection of video and installation works curated by Portia Malatjie. The title of the exhibition is an adaptation of a line from the prolific jazz composer and poet Sun Ra’s Differences (1980). In the poem, Ra contemplates “[communing] with intuitiveinstinct”.AsMalatjieposits,“The idea of communing conveys the sense of becoming one with the environment; being aware of one’s surroundings, and conjoining the physical and mental spaces that we inhabit”.

Vast, cosmopolitan Johannesburg has long held
its reputation as the Big Bad City. A patchwork
of contrasting districts, sprawling townships, compact gated communities, and extensive shopping mall complexes, South Africa's twenty years of democracy have yet to overcome numerous socio-economic inequities that still prevail across the city...

Parisian-style boulevards in Casablanca and Dakar, Portuguese forts and castles in Accra, a German Lutheran church in Windhoek; each African city echoes European influence in its own way. No country in Africa, however, reflects the influence of European architectural forms more than South Africa. Our urban centres brim with columns, pediments, and arches reminiscent of colonial architecture, exclusionary structures constructed in Edwardian and Neoclassical style.

“For most people love is the most profound source of pleasure... while the loss of those whom we love is the most profound source of pain. Hence, love and loss are two sides of the same coin.... It is the very transience of life that enhances love... For [many] of us, the fact that we shall one day lose the ones we love, and they us, draws us closer to them but remains a silent bell that wakes us in the night”
– Colin Murray Parkes

Attempting to make the amorphous 'morphous' through the polymorphous exploration of a single figure; Lionel Smit’s most recent body of work is a tactile exploration of the hybrid identity of the Cape Malay woman and her ever emerging and fluctuating experiences within South Africa’s psycho-social landscape.

Twenty years after the abolition of apartheid, South Africa’s story is no longer what it used to be. The country continues to rewrite its chapter in the history books, striving towards a society that is sincerely non-racial, cosmopolitan and democratic. Many have come to regard the universally recognised overthrow of institutionalised racism as the climax of its narrative, even, according to Achille Mbemba, as “the best gift Africa had ever given to the world”. In most narratives, the climax is the point at which a conflict is resolved, often through a dramatic accomplishment such as South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. Although, according to Mbemba, a post-colonial theorist and African philosopher, we have yet to reach that turning point. The antagonist in our story lives on, hulking beneath the rainbow in Desmond Tutu’s 'Rainbow Nation', breeding virulent legacies of intolerance, corruption and poverty.