Souad Mardam Bey

Mardam Bey’s practice transcends notions of time, place, and gender, and her paintings do not appear to be from a certain time, but rather refers to a liminal space without coordinates. A real sense of ethereal is imbued in her paintings, where one cannot infer whether the figure is male or female, and this brings a mysterious beauty to her characters and emphasizes the artists expansive imagination. Mardam Bey’s oversized canvases are covered with layers of emotion, texture, details and undercurrents which adorn her subjects. She places emphasis on her subject’s eyes which leave the viewer spellbound as they look for connection. Her art draws our attention to their deep understanding of how society unconsciously mobilizes our thought processes and leads us to dissect our perceptions of freedom.

Mmabatho Grace Mokalapa

Mmabatho Grace Mokalapa was born in Soweto (1992), where Mokalapa displayed an interest in art and science since her early childhood, which is evident in her work today. Mokalapa’s work is focused on the subjective experience(s) of spaces. Her interests lie in spatial voids and spaces that are often depersonalized, infinite and yet also uncanny and transcendental. Mokalapa’s work draws from an interest in how our psyche and ideas of “self” are transformed through an encounter with an external stimulus. She believes that transcendental space, have the ability to affect our perception and understanding of our bodies within them and of reality, space and time.

Mokalapa graduated in 2015 with a BA degree in Fine Arts and later became a recipient of The Studio Bursary at Assemblage Studios funded by the African Arts Trust. She is now currently based and practicing in Johannesburg.

Sue Greeff

Greeff completed her BA(FA) (2015) at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and currently lives and works in Cape Town. Greeff has participated in a number of solo and group shows and her work is held in private collections locally and internationally. Her artistic practice looks at the crossovers between biology, psychology and art. Her fascination with the body and mind stems from her experiences as a midwife, psychiatric nurse and mother. She draws reference from art history as well as iconography borrowed from popular culture, news footage and social media.

South African nurse turned fine artist, offers an opportunity to retrace a personal history of Nursing in South Africa while contributing to the ongoing conversation of a global pandemic. Comprised of a series of portraits drawn from photographs in her personal archive, the exhibition is an exploration of her own memories of Nursing in the late 70’s and 80’s, whist offering an opportunity to reflect on the events of the past year.

Yasmine Yacoubi

Yasmine Yacoubi’s 25-year painting journey has been across 4 continents, marked by varying developmental stages and using a diversity of techniques. That journey has now culminated in a focus on the vitality and the forces of nature. Her surrounds and their continuous transformations are her main sources of both fascination and inspiration.  What guides her has always been what she sees, hears and touches around her.

Yasmine Yacoubi was born in Germany, grew up in Morocco and studied in France. She attended numerous painting workshops in Melbourne, from when she first arrived there in 1997. Yacoubi first exhibited in 2008, in Santiago, Chile where she lived for eight years. Since arriving in Cape Town a decade ago, she has enjoyed immersing herself in the local artistic community, attending various workshops and participating in group exhibitions.

Nina Holmes

Holmes is a Cape Town-based artist who completed her Post Graduate Diploma (2017) with distinction at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. She has had two solo exhibitions with Eclectica Contemporary and was featured in the 2020 Investec Cape Town Art Fair solo section.

Following for the inevitable influence of found images, photographs and the borrowing of techniques and inspirations from other paintings, Nina Holmes works loosely and around expectations. Holme’s paintings are never limited to canvas and oil. Instead they push the formal, rigid canon of painting. She enjoys working on multiple paintings at the same time, with work spread out across her studio in Woodstock. The working process is occasionally accompanied by a grand symphonic soundtrack and sometimes with silence. There is careful thinking and intense working through various influences and concepts.

Alet Swarts

Simultaneously incongruous and familiar, Alet Swarts’ paintings are filled with metaphorical images, textures and patterns. These are sometimes presented out of context, to suggest ambiguity and create deliberate juxtaposition. Intricate compositions feature birds, flowers and networks of botanical patterns alongside landscapes which explore depth-of field through delicate water droplets. They are painted in great detail, with meditative precision and intensity, as a contradiction to the lightness and fleetingness of the moments they represent. Swarts is a full time Pretoria based visual artist and she has participated in numerous local exhibitions. 

Alet Swarts
A thread of colour
2020
Oil on Belgian linen
32 x 32 cm

Alet Swarts
When the cannon fires
2020
Oil on Belgian linen
32 x 32 cm

Alexia Vogel

The painted worlds of Alexia Vogel translate the lush, fantasy scapes of Romanticism and the sublime into a contemporary realm. Her immersive canvases exudes a sense of longing for past worlds and evokes a feeling of Nostalgia in the viewer.  With her mark making directed by gesture and spontaneity, Vogel allows the materiality of the paint and its autonomous movement across the surface of the canvas to direct her process. Moments of lucidity dissolve into states of hazy meditation as the artist intuitively shifts between abstraction and figuration.

Alexia Vogel
Jungle Glow II
2019
Oil on Canvas
150 x 140 cm

(courtesy of Barnard Gallery)