Working Life in South Africa: Gerard Sekoto & Lena Hugo

About the Exhibition

Strauss & Co will host a two-person exhibition featuring Gerard 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 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.

South African 1913-1993 

Gerard Sekoto is recognised as a pioneer of black South African modernism. He was born at Botshabelo Lutheran mission station in Mpumalanga in 1913 and studied at Grace Dieu, an Anglican training college for black school teachers. He worked as a teacher until 1939 when he moved to Johannesburg to pursue a career as an artist. Sekoto lived in the vibrant multiracial community of Sophiatown and the rich colour of his paintings from this time captures the reality of living in the townships, but with sensitivity, dignity, and a sense of calmness despite the harsh realities of life under apartheid. Sekoto went into self-imposed exile in Paris in 1947 where he worked as an artist and musician until his death in 1993. He was designated a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and posthumously received the Order of Ikhamanga for achievement in the arts from the South African government.

South African 1975- 

Helena Hugo has been a full-time artist since graduating from the University of Pretoria in 1996. She focuses on pastel drawings, but her mediums also include oils, fibre arts and occasional experiments with photography. Her highly finished, detailed, expressions of people are mostly depictions of South African and migrant hand labourers. Her fibre artworks are most often made from reappropriated clothing previously worn and owned by South African and migrant labourers. Although her past thematic content has always been centred around ‘work’ as an important element of our physical survival and psychological well being, it also had an underlying investigative probing into our universal human condition, our transient, fragile nature and the cycle of birth, death and resurrection. Recently she began to explore our fear of death, of disappearing or of lacking significance and how it sometimes manifests in destructive behaviour towards other humans as well as towards animals and nature. Currently she is working on a body of work exploring the ambiguous and changeable nature of power. She has exhibited her work widely in South Africa, in London, Holland, France, America and China. Art works have been bought by corporate collectors like Standard Chartered Bank, London, The University of Johannesburg, The Johannesburg Eye Hospital, Vulisango Holdings, The Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, Ukwazi Mining Industry Consultants, UNISA, William Humphreys gallery, The National Museum of China as well as private collectors around the world.

“Women are traditionally viewed as protectors of children and caregivers to those weaker than themselves. In Greek Mythology, Gaia has the more portentous role of personifying earth itself, the giver of all life. In this portrait, seemingly soft and gentle “woman” is subtly portrayed as able protector of self, other women and even of man – not just the boy child, but the grown man, having in her the power to aid him emotionally, but also physically if needed. She has self-reliance and wisdom, not only intuitive spiritual wisdom, but also intellect and logic.”