Painted in exile, Portrait belongs to the long middle stretch of Gerard Sekoto’s Paris years, when the township scenes of Sophiatown and Eastwood had given way to more introspective, thickly worked heads that folded memory, homesickness and political disillusion into a single, searching gaze. Having left South Africa in 1947 in self-imposed protest against segregation, Sekoto spent the rest of his life in France, supporting himself as a night-club pianist while continuing to paint and gradually gaining international recognition as a pioneer of urban Black social realism. In these later portraits the figure becomes less a specific sitter than a condensed presence – part self-image, part everyman – built up in dense impasto that recalls the chalk and coloured pencils of his mission-school training. The dark, close-cropped composition suggests the psychic compression of exile: a life lived between languages and continents, watching apartheid’s brutality from afar. Positioned within the exhibition, this Portrait reads as a quiet counterpoint to the more overtly narrative works in the show, reminding us that the struggle against apartheid was also waged in the interior realm of feeling, where artists like Sekoto laboured to hold together dignity, complexity, and hope in the face of erasure.