Art Focus: Working Life in South Africa – Gerard Sekoto & Lena Hugo

Wilhelm van Rensburg and the Strauss & Co team are delighted to invite you to a walkabout of the 2025 Legacy Exhibition Working Life in South Africa: Gerard Sekoto & Lena Hugo, on Wednesday 14 May at 11am in Johannesburg.

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 Senior Art Specialist and Head Curator. 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.