This exhibition featuring Sekoto’s enigmatic self- portrait set to be a top attraction in Johannesburg
By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor
If there is one artist who for the longest of time has held his own when it comes to his life’s work’s performance on the secondary market (the commercially driven art auction market) in South Africa, it is Gerard Sekoto.
The late legendary South African painter, who died while in self-exile in France has performed consistently on the auction floor with collectors gunning for his work that is still very much in circulation around the world.
Owning a Gerard Sekoto today, means one would be owning a prized possession. However, for ordinary folk whose pockets are not deep enough to own this artist’s work, it has always been a frustrating issue to view his work in an exhibition set up. There is simply has not been enough exhibitions showing Sekoto’s work beyond the auction floor where a few are able to view and bid for his work.
However, those that have been waiting for this opportunity, no longer have to wait because an exhibition that features his work, alongside that of Hugo will open next week Tuesday 8 April, 2025, at Strauss &Co.’s offices in Houghton, Johannesburg. This is a by -invitation-only opening event, but thereafter the exhibition will be open to the public for viewing.
This exhibition titled Legacy Exhibition – Working Life in South Africa: Gerard Sekoto & Lena Hugo is poised to be one of the top attractions in the arts in Johannesburg for the duration of its run, bound to attract those that have been a fan of this highly sought after artist as well as those that continue to seek and collect his work on the secondary market.
Gerard Sekoto’s 1947 self-portrait
And to top it all, this exhibition also features a rare Sekoto art work created early in his career -Gerard Sekoto’s 1947 self-portrait, the toast of the global north.
In 2024, curator Adriano Pedrosa included Gerard Sekoto’s earliest known self-portrait in his exhibition Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere at the 60th Venice Biennale. Painted in October 1947, shortly after his arrival in London en route to Paris, where he remained in self-exile away from the Apartheid regime until his death in 1993. The work depicts 34-year-old Sekoto, his brow creased and anxious, yet also “fully determined” to endure. The painting’s yellow-green palette is characteristic of Sekoto’s highly
prized works from the early 1940s.
Infrequently traded after its creation, Sekoto’s enigmatic self- portrait was repatriated to South Africa sometime after 2006. In 2008, following its appearance in the selling exhibition “Take your road and travel along”: The Advent of the Modern Black Painter in Africa in Johannesburg, the work entered the Kilbourn Collection. After various outings in South Africa, it is now enjoying significant visibility in Europe.
Currently, Sekoto’s self-portrait is the leading work in the publicity for the exhibition Paris Noir: Artistic Circulations and Anti-Colonial Resistance, 1950–2000 (19 March – 30 June 2025) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
This ambitious exhibition in the City of Light retraces the presence and influence of 150 artists from Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean who were active in France from the 1950s to 2000 – among them Sekoto, who achieved considerable attention in 1950s cosmopolitan Paris.
In recognition of this pioneering artist’s current visibility, Strauss & Co will host a two-person exhibition featuring Sekoto and Lena Hugo in Johannesburg. Curated by Wilhelm van Rensburg,
Senior Art Specialist and Head Curator at Strauss & Co, Working Life in South Africa: Gerard
Sekoto & Lena Hugo (1 April – 30 May 2025) will explore Sekoto’s depictions of labourers—nannies, washerwomen, brick-makers, coal merchants, miners, barbers, shopkeepers, street photographers, and water drawers—alongside Hugo’s pastel drawings of heavy-machinery operators.
“The aim of the exhibition is to present, through a selection of paintings by Sekoto, the nature of work and the world workers created for themselves in the first half of the 20th century, juxtaposed with Lena Hugo’s depictions of workers in the 21st century,” says Wilhelm van Rensburg. The exhibition will include Sekoto’s pre-exile oil painting, The Mother on the Road (c.1945–47), an important work featured in Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties, a retrospective exhibition held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1989.
The Mother on the Road (will be offered for sale in Strauss & Co’s flagship live sale in May 2025.
www.straussart.co.za