HELL-BENT
Group Show of Greatmore Artists | Curated by Cheryl Traub Adler & Luxolo Witvoet
Main Gallery: 03.12.26 - 14.01.26
HELL-BENT brings together a group of artists currently working at the Greatmore Studios in Woodstock. This artist-centred space is a place that emerged from the workshop culture of the 1980’s and continues to house studio space for the artist community.
Emerging from lived experience, young artists are developing a fresh visual language that speaks beyond its immediate context. Their work is part of a new aesthetic with global reach, contributing to wider conversations about painting, identity, culture and the ways in which we understand the world. Many are already exhibiting and selling their work internationally, bringing perspectives shaped by South African experience into an expanding global art landscape.
The work is immediate and insistent. It draws on local inherited visual languages, bringing technique, tradition and experimentation into productive tension. The work sometimes encompasses intense colour, pattern and materiality. Creating strong, vibrant works, often containing a social message or working toward a tension around a new aesthetic.
HELL-BENT explores the friction between personal certainty and doubt, combining the individual experience with a shared, social set of conditions. These works do not necessarily offer answers. Instead, they invite us to look again, to reconsider how our assumptions shape what we see and believe in.
For young South African artists, visual language is never neutral. What emerges is neither a simple continuation of the past nor an attempt to conform to an established international aesthetic, but a set of distinctive practices that occupy a new space in contemporary South African Art.
This exhibition acknowledges the importance of places where artists can work safely, exchange ideas and develop their practices as professional artists.
