Cape Town

STEVENSON is pleased to present When Works Meet Again, a follow up to our 2024 summer group show, When Works Meet. Where the first iteration largely featured works from the gallery’s inventory and pieces from collections in the process of being reconfigured, this selection is more elliptically composed.

Somewhat ironically, When Works Meet Again is significantly comprised of new works. Artists such as Cian-Yu Bai, Wim Botha, Georgina Gratrix, Penny Siopis, Deborah Poynton and Guy Tillim share fresh studio output while others such as Jemila Isa, Mawande Ka Zenzile and Neo Matloga present works created for Joburg audiences in Cape Town for the first time. This transplanting of contexts is most prominent in the works of Jane Alexander, Serge Alain Nitegeka and Portia Zvavahera. Alexander’s Domestic Angel (1984) was shown at the Market Gallery in Newtown, Johannesburg, as part of the artist’s lauded MAFA exhibition before spending decades out of public view; Nitegeka’s monumental paintings and sculptures are drawn from Into the Black, his recent survey at the Wits Art Museum; and Hide There (2024) by Zvavahera featured in Zvavakarurwa curated by Tamar Garb, travelling across museums in the UK. These instances of works existing institutionally and internationally before their resuscitation in the commercial environment highlight how paradox and symbiosis characterise the dynamic between viewing and buying publics.

When Works Meet foregrounded how the return and revival of images echoes the circuitous life of artworks - moving in and out of collections, studios, galleries and auctions. When Works Meet Again, in turn, supplements these reflections with a foregrounding of the conventions of display and propriety. Familiar names are joined by those less familiar in the context of Stevenson such as Mahesh Baliga, Tofo Bardi, Jaldip Chauhan, Salim Currimjee, Nicholas Hlobo, Tumelo Mthimkulu, Sheila Nowers, Thando Phenyane, Brett Charles Seiler, Shakil Solanki, Peter Clarke, Dumile Feni, Malangatana Valente Ngwenya and Twins Seven Seven, reflecting how programmes can be as mobile as the works themselves.

When Works Meet Again features the work of over 40 artists arranged as pairs and groupings that offer unexpected resonances, their connective threads spanning the concretely formal to oblique syncopations of concept. Again, this exhibition is about these essential and ongoing conversations – between galleries, artists and collectors, and between artworks themselves. And again, in these encounters space is left for awkwardness, perhaps even discomfort, as artworks enter one another’s orbit and find their exchange with other works, maintaining their singularity while joining a collective where narrative and meaning are opened up and taken in unexpected directions.

The exhibition opens Saturday 6 December, 10am to 1pm.