Barnard Gallery Gallery in Cape Town

Newlands · Contemporary programme

Editorial Profile

Barnard Gallery is an established contemporary art gallery in Newlands, Cape Town, founded in 2010 by Christiaan Barnard. Its program is positioned between a local South African context and a wider international field, with a focus on emerging and mid-career artists from South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Europe. Within contemporary art in Cape Town, the gallery occupies a relatively intimate but clearly defined role: less institutional in scale than the city’s major museums, yet more programmatically structured than a purely commercial showroom. Its exhibitions have tended to move across painting, photography, lens-based work, collage, and installation, often giving space to artists whose practices are grounded in material observation, abstraction, landscape, memory, and social or ecological reflection.

The gallery’s recent and past program includes exhibitions such as After Nature by Lien Botha and Jaco van Schalkwyk, The Depth of Things by Jennifer Morrison, Even Rocks Melt in the Sun by Peter Eastman, and group projects including Between Worlds and Barnard Collective. These examples suggest a curatorial rhythm built around solo presentations, recurring collective formats, and sustained relationships with artists such as Tom Cullberg, Alexia Vogel, Richard Mudariki, Alastair Whitton, and Lien Botha. As part of the wider network of galleries in Cape Town, Barnard contributes to the city’s commercially active yet artist-centered gallery ecology, while its participation in the Investec Cape Town Art Fair has helped place its program within a broader regional and international contemporary art circuit.

Selected Artists

Tom Cullberg

Swedish-South African

PaintingDrawingPrintmaking
About

A Cape Town-based artist whose paintings, drawings, and editions move between abstraction, book-like objects, landscape references, and restrained architectural compositions shaped by memory, surface, and spatial ambiguity.

Lien Botha

South African

PhotographyDigital ArtMixed Media
About

A lens-based artist and writer whose photographic practice extends beyond documentation, using post-production, sequencing, and layered narrative structures to explore memory, place, language, and acts of looking.

Jaco van Schalkwyk

South African

PaintingSculptureInstallation
About

An artist working across painting and object-based forms, known for photorealist and hyperrealist images that reflect on perception, portraiture, collected objects, and the mediation of personal experience.

Peter Eastman

South African

PaintingMixed Media
About

A painter known for experimental surfaces and atmospheric forest imagery, using materials such as oil, enamel, resin, wax, graphite, and aluminium to shift between abstraction and representation.

Richard Mudariki

Zimbabwean

PaintingConceptual Art
About

A Cape Town-based painter whose structured, satirical compositions address power, politics, migration, and contemporary African social realities through symbolic figures, bold colour, and historically charged visual references.

Alexia Vogel

South African

PaintingDrawing
About

A painter whose intuitive landscapes and works on paper move between abstraction and figuration, using colour, gesture, and fluid mark-making to evoke memory, fantasy, and atmospheric states.

Alastair Whitton

British/South African

PhotographyConceptual Art
About

A photographer and visual artist whose work examines memory, geography, history, and place, often using photographic series to consider how images shape recognition, recollection, and cultural orientation.

Jennifer Morrison

South African

Painting
About

A South African-born, UK-based painter whose abstract works focus on colour, texture, scale, and form, treating painting as a physical and experiential encounter between control, accident, and material presence.

Selected Exhibitions

After nature

Group show2023

Lien Botha, Jaco van Schalkwyk

About

A collaborative exhibition joining Botha’s lens-based digital photographic deconstructions with van Schalkwyk’s landscape painting, shaped by shared concerns with conservation, storytelling, ecological fragility, and the altered perception of nature.

PhotographyPainting

The depth of things

Solo show2023

Jennifer Morrison

About

Morrison’s first Cape Town solo exhibition focused on abstract oil painting, foregrounding colour, texture, brushwork, and the experiential force of painting rather than narrative or representational content.

Painting

Even rocks melt in the sun

Solo show2023

Peter Eastman

About

A solo presentation of forest paintings on aluminium, centered on immersive views of an ancient valley landscape where light, erosion, growth, and deep ecological time become painterly subjects.

Painting

Strange light

Solo show2023

Alexia Vogel

About

Vogel’s fifth solo show with Barnard presented bold abstract paintings in which gesture, darkened colour, floral echoes, and altered studio light translated memory and environmental mood into painterly movement.

Painting

Maonero Angu (My Reality II)

Solo show2018

Richard Mudariki

About

Mudariki’s first solo exhibition with Barnard examined the artist’s studio as a site where personal reflection, painting, art history, political satire, and contemporary social events intersect.

Painting

At Sand’s Edge

Solo show2017

Virginia MacKenny

About

MacKenny’s exhibition brought together oil and watercolour landscapes responding to environmental duress, drought, desertification, and the fragile relationship between human culture and the natural world.

Painting

Monochrome

Group show2019

About

A group exhibition of selected artists working in painting, photography, drawing, video installation, and collage, using restricted palettes to foreground line, tone, composition, and contemplative visual effects.

Curated Group ShowPaintingPhotography

Barnard Collective

Group show2017

Alexia Vogel, Sarah Biggs, Lien Botha, Hugh Byrne, Tom Cullberg, Alex Emsley, Ryan Hewett, MJ Lourens, Virginia MacKenny, Richard Mudariki, Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi, Robyn Penn, Katherine Spindler, Alastair Whitton, Jaco van Schalkwyk

About

A year-end group presentation combining signature works from the gallery’s stable with invited artists, reviewing recent highlights while previewing collaborative directions planned for the following year.

Curated Group ShowMixed Media

Gallery Overview

Barnard Gallery
City
Cape Town
Area
Newlands
Address
55 Main Road, Newlands, 7700, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
Type
Gallery
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