Strauss & Co’s new exhibition in celebration of the 2024 Earthshot Prize in Cape Town 

“A Reinvented Vocabulary: The Recycled in Contemporary Art” showcases and celebrates South African artists who draw inspiration from and respond to nature within their practices, highlighting the country’s long tradition of climate activism and engagement with ecological concerns through art-making. The notion of “the recycled” gestures to the relationality to materiality reflected upon by Okwui Enwezor as the expansive manner in which we can engage concepts of reuse — away from impoverishment and ideas of deficit that may have been attached to Africa in general. 

The exhibition features a cohort of impactful works, some of which are rendered in non-traditional materials; including found and reused objects as well as natural elements. The artists in this exhibition have developed a new vocabulary that challenges and responds to the relationship between contemporary life and nature through inquiries that coalesce impacts of the economy, politics, socio-politics, culture and the personal. For instance, Zimbabwean artist Tawanda Takura uses heels, strings, and leather in innovative ways to create evocative assemblages while Igshaan Adams uses ubiquitous everyday materials—rope, beads, and strings—to weave tapestries that engage with local landscapes and their historical entanglements. Through oil painting, Matthew Hindley gestures toward the possibility of restoration with images of burning forests, while Karel Nel, with carboniferous materials and salt on wooden bases, reminds us of nature in its totality, spanning the cosmos. 

The exhibition is staged with gratitude to The Kilbourn Collection and The Caro Wiese Collection, from which a significant portion of the works have been drawn. 

A Reinvented Vocabulary: The Recycled in Contemporary Art is on view at Strauss & Co in Woodstock until Friday 8th November. 

Media queries about The Earthshot Prize – Director of Communications, Oisin O’Malley: Oisin.OMalley@earthshotprize.org 

Media queries about Strauss & Co: Bina Genovese: bina@straussart.co.za or Marina Carlaw: Marina@straussart.co.za 

www.straussart.co.za