Exhibition Walkabout – Working Life in South Africa: Gerard Sekoto and 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.

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 exhibition will include Sekoto’s pre-exile oil painting, ‘Mother and Child’ (c. 1945–47), an important work featured in ‘Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties’, a retrospective exhibition held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1989. ‘Mother and Child’ will be offered for sale in Strauss & Co’s flagship live sale in May 2025.

“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,”

– Wilhelm van Rensburg, Senior Art Specialist and Head Curator