Marlise Keith brings Murmuration’ to HUB Gallery. An uncanny, kaleidoscopic 20-year mini retrospective
The exhibition opened on February 16, 2026 and runs till April 17, 2026.
By CityLife Arts Writer
If you want to travel a journey of life, at least through the perspective of visual artist Marlise Keith, in the form of sculptural works and eye catching drawing brings, you do not have to look further than the artist’s current exhibition Murmuration at HUB Gallery in Cape Town. An uncanny, kaleidoscopic 20-year mini retrospective.
This is a retrospective exhibition, showcasing the work of this artist for closely to 30 years. You will therefore be able to feasts your eyes on both old and new works the artist has created over that span of time.
Therefore it is proper that HUB Gallery opened its 2026 programme with this mini retrospective as this is a focusedoverview of work by Cape Town-based multimedia artist Keith, showcasing pieces that span her career. It runs from 16 February to 17 April 2026.
An award-winning artist with a Master’s degree in Fine Art and a trajectory spanning nearly three decades, Keith has exhibited widely both locally and abroad. Her work has been recognised through honours including the Sanlam Vuleka Art Award and a Top 10 placement in the Absa L’Atelier.
Keith’s work is fuelled by what she affectionately calls her ‘mental soup’ which comprises a swirling mixture of memories, pets, migraines, news headlines, roadside memorials, colonial residues, dreams and everyday oddities. Violence and tenderness sit side by side; whimsy rubs shoulders with discomfort.
Defying categorisation, she builds worlds from fragments (both precious and disposable) and in doing so, challenges how we understand value, memory and meaning. The exhibition is an exciting moment for HUB Gallery and for collectors wanting to engage with a truly distinctive South African voice.
‘Murmuration’ includes works both old and new. The exhibition showcases key pieces collected by Spier Arts Trust (SAT), some of Keith’s earliest assemblages and sculptures, as well as large-scale drawings embedded with three-dimensional elements that have evolved into her distinctive low-relief sculptural style. The decision to dedicate this mini retrospective to Keith is rooted in a deep, decades-long relationship with SAT.
‘Spier Arts Trust has had the privilege of acquiring Marlise Keith’s work for more than two decades,’ says Chief Curator Tamlin Blake. ‘Among the many artists we have collected over time, her work remains singular, not only for the strength and consistency of her practice, but for the depth of her engagement with our artistic community.’
Keith has collaborated closely with HUB studios in beading and mosaic, was a long-time teacher at the Spier Arts Academy, has lectured and mentored emerging artists across the SAT ecosystem, and has been an enthusiastic contributor to the Creative Block programme. Facilitated by SAT, she was invited to be part of the Nando’s “Feast Your Eyes” pop-up exhibition in Soho (2017) and its booth at the 1-54 African Art Fair in London (2019).
Alongside the foundational pieces on show as part of ‘Murmuration’, the exhibition debuts Keith’s newest challenge: paintings on irregular-shaped canvases that push her practice into unfamiliar and deliberately uncomfortable territory. These irregular canvas works, with their awkward silhouettes and complex compositional demands, mark an exciting new chapter in the artist’s evolving visual language.
As a whole, the mini retrospective opens a window into the shifting, layered and often darkly humorous world of Keith’s imagination. A ‘murmuration’ is the low, indistinct sound created by a flock of starlings moving in synchrony, their darting motions believed to confuse predators and transmit lifesaving information instantly and without degradation. For Keith, this phenomenon became a metaphor for gathering two decades of her work into a single space.
‘I imagined all my works communicating with each other (with no degradation) and what that would sound like. Themes repeat across the years, but what once shouted is now softened by its neighbour. The result is a murmuring that is no less powerful, a protective collective that guards the subjects still too daunting, too confusing or too subliminal to articulate in neat words,’ she says.
In bringing these individual pieces together to form a body, Murmuration offers audiences layered insights into the evolution of this complex and compelling artist. A distilled experience, not to be missed!
All the details:When: 16 February to 17 April 2026
Where: HUB Gallery, Union House, 25 Commercial Street, Cape Town.