BLACK MODERNISM: Between Abstraction and Spirit: A focused constellation of works made between the 1940s and the late 1990s drawn from key figures of South Africa’s Black Modernist generation

Black Modernism: Between Abstraction and Spirit presents a focused constellation of works made between the 1940s and the late 1990s. Drawn from key figures of South Africa’s Black Modernist generation – Peter Clarke, Dumile Feni, Sydney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae, Ephraim Ngatane, Helen Sebidi, Lucky Sibiya, Gerard Sekoto and others – the exhibition is punctuated by “Black-modern adjacent” artists such as Cecil Skotnes, Edoardo Villa and Maggie Laubser, whose practices intersected with, responded to, and at times complicated this history. Together, these works trace how form, spirit and lived experience were negotiated in a violently segregated society, and how those negotiations continue to shape contemporary art today.

Emerging under apartheid, these artists worked in conditions of censorship, racialised restriction and precarious mobility. Their turn to modernist experimentation was never purely formal. Clarke’s townships and coastal communities, Ngatane’s densely worked street scenes, and Feni’s torqued figures distilled the psychic pressure of everyday life under a regime that legislated where one could live, study and love. Kumalo’s bronzes and drawings, Legae’s anatomical studies and Sibiya’s carved panels mined African sculptural and spiritual traditions, not as ethnographic quotation, but as living languages capable of holding grief, dignity, and transformation. Skotnes’ incised panels and tapestries, Villa’s steel abstractions and Laubser’s expressionist landscapes testify to parallel efforts by white artists to find a South African modernism rooted in local experience rather than imported styles, even as they were differently positioned within the system that their Black peers actively resisted.

The exhibition’s title, Between Abstraction and Spirit, points to the way these artists shuttle between recognisable figures and landscapes and the more ineffable territories of belief, memory and emotion. Abstraction offered a way to speak obliquely about

what could not be represented directly: the humiliation of pass laws, the terror of police raids, the weight of historical erasure. But it also opened a space for spiritual registers that exceeded the documentary. Kumalo’s matriarchs and madalas, Villa’s totemic steel constructions and Sibiya’s ancestral dancers all suggest presences that are more than human – ancestors, guardians, witnesses – inhabiting the same fractured modernity as city streets and mine dumps.

This concern with spirit and embodiment resonates strongly with contemporary practice. Many artists working today return to archive, ritual, and performance to think through Black futures and the afterlives of colonialism. The bodies in Feni’s Untitled (Prisoner) or Sebidi’s reclining figure can be read alongside today’s preoccupations with carcerality, gendered violence, and the labouring body – persistent structures that outlived formal apartheid. Clarke’s Land of Thorns and Ngatane’s Pimville scenes anticipate the visual languages now used to depict climate crisis, urban precarity and informal economies: jagged marks for environmental degradation, dense crowds for mass movement and protest.

The timing of the exhibition, on the cusp of the 50-year anniversary of the Soweto Uprising of June 1976, sharpens these resonances. The student-led protests against the imposition of Afrikaans in Black schools, and the brutal state response in which at least 176 people – many of them schoolchildren – were killed, marked an irreversible turning point in South African politics and international perceptions of apartheid. The uprising crystallised issues many of the artists in this exhibition had long grappled with:

the violence of Bantu Education, the suppression of African histories and languages, and the urgent need to claim psychic and physical space for Black life. 

Several works here can be read as pre- and post-1976 meditations on those pressures. Legae’s late-1970s anatomical studies, for example, break the body into fragments – torsos, hands, skulls – that hover between classical drawing and autopsy report. They

echo a generation’s experience of seeing Black youth turned into statistics, their individuality denied even in death. Ngatane’s gatherings and street processions, painted in the decade leading up to Soweto, anticipate the crowds of young people who would later occupy those streets in protest. Clarke’s mourners and Sekoto’s portraits similarly inscribe grief and introspection into the modernist canon, countering the abstraction of political discourse with the specificity of individual feeling.

At the same time, the exhibition insists that Black Modernism was never only reactive. These artists were not merely documenting atrocity; they were building new aesthetic and ethical worlds. The Amadlozi group – which linked Skotnes, Villa, Kumalo, and

Legae in the early 1960s – explicitly turned to African sculptural “ancestors” as a way to reimagine modernist form, emphasising verticality, compression and frontal presence instead of classical European proportion. That cross-racial collaboration was

fraught, but it points to a longer history of artistic exchange and to ongoing debates around cultural appropriation, privilege, and solidarity that continue to animate today’s art world.

Beyond South Africa, the exhibition speaks into a global climate marked by renewed authoritarianism and radicalised identity politics. Commentators have described the last decade as an “age of strongmen”, with leaders across the world consolidating power through nationalist rhetoric, attacks on the press and the scapegoating of minorities. From MAGA rallies to Hindu nationalist campaigns and European far-right resurgences, the tactics are unnervingly familiar: a manufactured nostalgia for a mythic past, a promise of security in exchange for rights, a narrowing of who counts as fully human. Against this backdrop, the work of South Africa’s Black Modernists – forged under an earlier regime of exclusionary politics – takes on renewed urgency. Their insistence on complexity, hybridity and spiritual depth counters the flattening tendencies of both propaganda and social media outrage.

Black Modernism: Between Abstraction and Spirit positions these works not as historical curiosities but as active interlocutors in our present. Their languages of skewed perspective, fractured anatomy and symbolic colour feel startlingly current in a moment when many artists again turn to painting, drawing and sculpture to process collective trauma. In celebrating figures such as Clarke, Feni, Ngatane, Sebidi and Sibiya alongside Skotnes, Villa and Laubser, the exhibition argues for a more entangled understanding of South African modernism – one in which Black artists are recognised as the generative core, and white contemporaries are understood in relation to that core rather than as neutral modernist pioneers.

Opening Peffers Fine Art’s renovated Loop Street gallery with this exhibition is therefore both a historical and a forward-looking gesture. Situated in Cape Town’s city centre – itself a site layered with histories of forced removals, commercial speculation

and contemporary cultural production – the show invites viewers to consider how the modernist experiments of the mid- to late-twentieth century continue to animate the city’s studios, streets, and spiritual life today. It offers collectors, scholars, and the

broader public an opportunity to engage intimately with works that have shaped, and will continue to shape, the visual language through which South Africa imagines itself in a world once again grappling with division, inequality and the seductions of

“strongman” certainty.