Notes on the creation of an artwork that would find it's way into becoming the cover image of the Netflix documentary "The Trials of Winnie Mandela" - Shamiela Tyer reflects on Loyiso Mkize's artistic process of capturing Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's essence, in relation to the complexities of her life in the public eye as a prolific political figure.
An atmosphere of virtue, thick with contradiction. Director and curator of Eclectica Contemporary, Shamiela Tyer, revisits Johannes Phokela's inclusion in the 2026 Venice Biennale.
A solo show by South African and Spanish artist Pierre Louis Geldenhuys, reflecting on the natural environment using innovative and intuitive techniques that unravel humanity's relationship to mother nature. He was featured at The 2026 Investec Cape Town Art Fair.
As a deeper engagement with Jamaica's masquerade tradition, Jonkonnu, Richard Nattoo extends the narrative of his solo show, The Passage Between Worlds, as a spiritual system that carries African cosmology through Caribbean history. Deeply interrogative, and entangled in dynamics of the past and future, this showcase embodies the richness of African ritual practices, and tethers us between what is visible and hidden.
Eclectica Contemporary at Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2026 explores identity, memory and materiality across contemporary artistic practices. These curated works, featuring a dynamic line up of artists including Ebenezer Samuel Akinola, Ibrahim Khatab and Justin Dingwall, each one proposes materiality not as passive matter, but as an active site of transmission, where artists give life to legacies of place, belief, labour, and becoming within their practices.
Cairo-born artist and decorated educator Ibrahim Khatab showcases a concise, material-focused retrospective charting seven years of artistic development through a carefully curated selection of seven to ten works. Calligraphy, textures, sculpture and urban residues embed memory and resistance across multimodal works. Here, transformation becomes integral to his practice and is reinforced through points of beautifully crafted refinement or intuitive, yet concise, bursts of disruption.
This spectacular display of energy and portals into unseen territory by Younes Khourassani, invites viewers into a solo show that offers us the opportunity to see light as a form of power, that invigorates the cosmos influences how we understand our humanity. In pieces designed as chromatic shifts, colour becomes a core element where Khourassani explores not only a relation to abstraction, but as a profound celebration into the wonders of existence and transformative practice.
Eclectica Contemporary is pleased to present The Valley of the Red Gods, a solo exhibition by renowned colourist painter Cathy Layzell. This exhibition positions abstraction as a form of reverence. Situated through the conceptual and chromatic hue of Red Disa, the reflective nature of colour and light becomes a way for us to see nature as fractal, invoked. Nature is not romanticised , it is entered through a manifestation of Red Disa. Layzell’s paintings ask the viewer to slow down, to look as one looks into water , aware that what is seen is inseparable from what is felt.
Eclectica Contemporary presents a summer exhibition featuring Sahlah Davids, Ibrahim Khatab, Loyiso Mkize and Lars Fischedick. Across varied mediums ranging from Lars' conceptual wooden constructions to Sahlah's amalgamated fabrics, pins and brooches, these artists interrogate how material can act as witness, and a reflective of collective memory as an act of resistance.
Muofhe Manavhela's personal, intimate works depict the shared, experiences livelihoods of Black women in the greater community of South Africa, spanning across time, and transcending it - Manavhela's art delves into portraiture as a form of showing love, pleasure, youth, sexuality, regality and the domesticity of Black womanhood. Through tracing a matriarchal history, fragmented history is brought back into the canon and depicted as thoughtful, honouring pieces centering the people Manavhela admires and chooses to depict with honesty, and lightness.
