Writing Art History Since 2002

First Title

Investec Cape Town Art Fair offers an intimate experience of the largest contemporary art fair in Africa, in one of the world’s most vibrant art cities. With over 107 exhibitors, 22,000 visitors, 4800 VIPs, and a supportive local art community, the fair provides a platform for collectors, galleries, curators, artists, and art journalists from around the globe to engage and create connections. Investec Cape Town Art Fair has proven to be the place where the fast-growing African art market and the international art world meet.

Over the past year and a half, the art world has transformed itself and adapted to our shifted way of thinking and doing, as a result of COVID-19. Investec Cape Town Art Fair assures you of our willingness to aid you in sustaining visibility, momentum, and presence; with utmost sensitivity around the impact that this time has brought. Therefore, Investec Cape Town Art Fair’s focus for its ninth edition is shared-support, collaboration, and inspiring new initiatives to ensure momentum and establish a support system amongst exhibitors. We believe in the art fair model to bring people together to connect, converse and contemplate at the forefront of contemporary art.

The 2022 edition of the fair looks profoundly to the notion of collaboration across aspects of Investec Cape Town Art Fair with the intention of opening up a dialogue and a shared support structure, with an exchange of ideas, research, artists, strategies and resources. We look forward to welcoming you to the 9th edition taking place between the 18th and 20th of February 2022 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.

The Melrose Gallery (South Africa)

Philiswa Lila, My School Days Half Card. Courtesy of the artist & The Melrose Gallery.

The Melrose Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Philiswa Lila titled ‘Nogolide: Sentimental Value’ in the Tomorrows/ Today section at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. She is a visual artist, curator and scholar fascinated by the socially relevant and timely issues of authorship and agency. She is interested in memory histories and theories of personal identities. Lila works across disciplines like painting, installation, and performance art, and includes the use of mediums such as animal skin (sheep, goat and cow), beading, wood, paper, photography, video and poetry.

For more information, please visit The Melrose Gallery.

This Is Not A White Cube (Angola)

Osvaldo Ferreira, MULHER, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100cm. Courteay of the artist & THIS NOT A WHITE CUBE.

THIS NOT A WHITE CUBE is an international contemporary art gallery with exhibition spaces in Luanda (Angola) and Lisbon (Portugal). Representing and collaborating with international established and emergent artists, the gallery’s program focuses on relevant and powerful narratives and discussions associated with the African continent and its diaspora. Despite the profound connection with Africa, it is the first Contemporary African gallery in Portugal that focuses not exclusively on Lusophone circles but also the emerging aesthetics of cultural and artistic productions from the Global South.

For more information, please visit THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE.

Asele Institute (Nigeria)

Uche Okeke, Isi Nwoji 2, 3 & 1. All on Digital pigment print. Printed on Fabriano Rosepina 285, 35  x 35cm.

The Professor Uche Okeke Legacy Limited in collaboration with its sister organisation, Asele Institute, proudly presents their first special release of Uche Okeke artworks posthumously as a series of exclusive limited-edition fine art prints. In commemoration of the master modernist’s memory and life they share Uche Okeke works, which are in the Asele Institute Art Collection. This will also be the half-decade anniversary of the iconic artist and African intellectual’s passing, to honour his legacy and his love for humanity.

For enquiries, please contact aseleinstitute@gmail.com

Deepest Darkest Art (South Africa)

Barry Salzman, Beyond The Pictoral, Rwanda, 2018. 100 x 133cm. Courtesy of the artist & Deepest Darkest Art.

Deepest Darkest Art, a Cape Town-based gallery, will be showing two projects by lens-based artist Barry Salzman. Barry Salzman is an International Award-Winning artist. Salzman’s work explores challenging themes around social, political and economic narratives. Acutely relevant, and brave in its willingness to confront, Salzman’s photography garnered an International Photographer of the Year Award in 2018 from the International Photography Awards (IPA) for his project, The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim.

For more information, please visit Deepest Darkest Art.

Eclectica Contemporary (South Africa)

Bob Nosa. Courtesy of the artist & Eclectica Contemporary.

Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Eclectica Contemporary sees itself as an African gallery with an international vision. They celebrate the diversity and depth of art making on the continent while aiming to contextualize it for a growing global market. Their programming of exhibitions shows a mix of solo shows by gallery artists alongside curated group shows.

Bob Nossa is born and resides in Benin City, Nigeria. This multidisciplinary artist works out of the Protest Art Studio, a fitting designation given the tenor of his practice: a relentless condemnation of the inhumanity of social and political systems that render people victims. The self-described art activist belongs to a protest subculture devoted to using art as a catalyst for change. His paintings, powerful, satirical comments on inhumanity, which run the gamut from abstract to representational, are distinguished by intense primary colours applied in large expressive strokes and frequently include collaged images and found materials. Surfaces are scratched with written texts and aerosol paint is roughly sprayed over and across painted forms.

For more information, please visit Eclectica Contemporary.

Afriart Gallery (Uganda)

Founded in 2002 by Daudi Karungi and located in Kampala, Afriart Gallery (AAG) has since become a leading contemporary art gallery representing artists from Africa. The gallery focuses on original forms of expression and dialogue with the public. It provides an environment where collectors can find powerful contemporary artistic ideas and discussions.

Sanaa Gateja is a mixed-media artist and jewellery designer who is widely known for his signature incorporation of recycled man-made waste materials in his practice, particularly his pioneering fashioning of beads from discarded paper, which earned him the nickname ‘The Bead King’ in Uganda. He also works with barkcloth, paper, raffia, wood and banana fiber, using his materials to construct large experimental abstract pieces of social and environmental commentary that straddle installation, tapestry and sculpture and strike a balance between aesthetic and conceptual value.

For more informatio, please visit Afriart Gallery.

50ty/50ty Print Studio (South Africa)

Lizette Chirreme, The fluid dance, dressed in red. 6-Colour screen print on archival cotton-based paper, 560 x 760m. Limited edition of 50. Courtesy of the artist & 50ty/50ty.

50ty/50ty is an online collection of limited-edition screen prints, created in collaboration with local artists, illustrators and designers. Representing the best of both established and emerging talent, each work is hand-printed on archival paper and available for purchase exclusively on this platform.

Chirrime is known for her vivid, textile-driven work; primarily rendered as fabric collages of bold, patterned, wax print materials traditionally associated with African dress. Fabrics are cut up, rearranged and stitched together to form fluid, nebulous shapes symbolic of nature (water in particular) and women, her subjects of choice. This creative process is deeply personal and cathartic, a deliberate act of healing and self-determination Chirrime describes as a “refashioning” of her self-image after a painful, broken past. “I literally ‘re-stitched’ myself together,” she states. She also extends this “mending” and “refashioning” beyond herself – to her community and the natural world – as an almost prophetic act.

Fore mor information, please visit 50ty/50ty prints.

Samuel Maenhoudt Gallery (Belgium)

Samuel Maenhoudt Gallery offers a selection of unique contemporary works by a variety of international photographers and artists, both emerging and well-established talents. The gallery specialises in conceptual fine art photography and the collection is specifically suited to the first time collector as to the more experienced connoisseur. Bastiaan Woudt is a sought-after photographer that started a mere ten years ago without formal training. Besides his raw talent, he owes his rise in the art world to a strong work ethic and an entrepreneurial edge. From emotive portraits to mystic landscape photography, he is known to capture monochrome minimalism at its finest.

For more information, please visit Samuel Maenhoudt Gallery.

Suburbia Contemporary (Barcelona)

Jake Aikman, Somewhere in between (Atlantic), 2020. Oil on linen, 188 x 230cm. Courtesy of the artist & Suburbia Contemporary.

Set on the outskirts of the city of Granada, was conceived as space operating outside of the centre, with all the opportunities for experimentation which that entails. Suburbia Contemporary’s satellite project space is new to Cape Town but is also one of many art spaces in the suburb of Woodstock. Jake Aikman lives and works in Cape Town. He obtained his Masters of Fine Arts (specializing in painting) in 2008 from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.

For more information, please visit Suburbia Contemporary.

EBONY/CURATED (South Africa)

Wole Lagunju, Deity, 2021. Ink on Fabriano, 84 x 51cm. Courtesy of the artist & EBONY/CURATED.

Established in 2007, EBONY/CURATED is a leading South African Gallery based in Cape Town and Franschhoek. The gallery has built a solid reputation for unlocking exciting talent from the continent and the greater African Diaspora. It’s well established public programme extends across 3 spaces highlighting both contemporary and notable modern artworks. EBONY/CURATED regularly participates in local and international art fairs and gallery artists are included in recognised public and private collections.

Wole Lagunju is a Nigerian who lives and works in the United States. Lagunju’s hybrid paintings of traditional Gelede masks are juxtaposed with images of modern women in the Western world and redefine the forms and philosophies of Yoruba visual art and design. He re-imagines and transforms cultural icons appropriated from the Dutch Golden and Elizabethan ages interspersed with elements from the Western world of the fifties and sixties. Lagunju’s cultural references, mined from the eras of colonisation and decolonisation of the African continent, critique the racial and social structures whilst simultaneously evoking commentaries on power, femininity and womanhood.

Fore more information, please visit EBONY/CURATED.

Galerie Carole Onambélé Kvasnevski (France)

© Justin Benda

Carole Onambélé Kvasnevski founded the Carole Kvasnevski art gallery in Paris, a space that provides cultural mediation. Carole exhibits emerging and established artists from the African continent and its diasporas The gallery’s curatorial line mainly promotes creations that raise environmental and societal questions.

Justin Ebanda lives between Yaoundé, Douala and Paris. Ebanda makes memory the matrix of her artistic work, of history in general and that of Africa in particular. He tries to portray the African collective memory through these actors and events by giving the opportunity to them and to witnesses to demonstrate their experience by inviting them to take a trip to the past, in search of lost time, it gives young people the opportunity to dream.

For more information, please visit Galerie Carole Onambélé Kvasnevski.

The Investec Cape Town Art Fair will be taking place from the 18th until the 20th of February 2022. For more information, please visit Investec Cape Town Art Fair.

Related Posts

Scroll to Top