The Poets Are Working

Surrealismemerged as a response to the catastrophic and anxious reality of life in the early 20th Century, where world wars, colonialism, and rapid industrialisation led artists, poets, and writers to explore alternative realities. A defiance of rational thoughtbecame the foundation that would define the movement’s aesthetic and conceptual framework.

In 1924, French writer and poet André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto, which focused less on the visual arts and more on the nature of thought and how to express it. As a result, Surrealism did not develop a singular visual style, unlike other modern Western art movements. Instead, it was shaped by a commitment to exploring the subconscious, which guidedits formal techniques and concepts. Breton urged society to turn inward in search of answers to life’s fundamental questions:

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. [1]

Marked by a similar sense of uncertainty and fragmentation, the present moment renews the urgency to imagine alternative realities, making the Surrealist impulse to challenge rational thought and turn toward the subconscious feel both relevant and necessary.

The foreboding work of Fred Page echoes early 20th-century European Surrealist masters like Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, and Salvador Dali. The strange, often eerie atmosphere of his pictorial worlds emerges from both concept and technique, as reality is reconfigured through irrational juxtapositions of the actual and the absurd. Page constructs a sparse, silent stage where figures stand, gesture, or perform, yet ultimately signify nothing.

Jozua Gerrard’s enamel-on-glass paintings extend this sense of disquiet through everyday scenes where masked figures, long shadows, and intimate detachment prevail. Stuart Dods’ contorted bronze figure, Whole (2023), and his triptych, Business Lunch (2025), draw on key Surrealist cues, using familiar yet dislocated imagery to create a similar sense of unease. Paul Wallington’s paintings, meanwhile, are fleeting and seasonal, collapsing past and present to suggest a world where nostalgia becomes a lens for imagining the future. Across these practices, everyday logic gives way to subconscious associations, where ordinary objects and symbols are reconfigured to evoke the same uncanny nostalgia found in Page’s work.

In Surrealist visual vernacular, the bed operates as a potent metaphor for the dream state and the subconscious. Mexican Surrealist artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) frequently depicted beds, most notably in El sueño (La cama) / The Dream (The Bed) (1940), where she fuses dream imagery and symbolic precision with unmatched emotional intensity. Following a near-fatal bus accident in her youth, Kahlo spent long periods bedridden, painting from this confined space, further encoding the bed as both subject and site of creation.

In Page’s Bed in a Landscape (1967), the four-poster bed becomes a vehicle for invoking the centrality of dreams within Surrealist thought. Marlene Steyn extends this lineage through a practice that understands embodiment as entangled and porous, with human, animal, terrestrial, and mythical forms interwoven. In Endorsing the Indoorsy (2023), the femme body frames a multi-layered domestic scene in which two beds appear, firmly situating the work within the legacies of Kahlo and Page.

For Justine Mahoney and Dominique Cheminais, French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) is a seminal influence.Her monumental steel spider sculpture Maman (1999) evokes both dream imagery and latent childhood fear. Across the work of Steyn, Mahoney, and Cheminais, the body emerges as a site of transformation – fragmented, entangled, and uncanny – continuing a Surrealist tradition of women artists probing the subconscious through playful yet unsettling forms.

Alexis Preller developed a sustained engagement with the traditional dress of Ndebele women, shaping a highly stylised figuration characterised by elongated limbs, high-set breasts, and small ovoid heads. In The Hay Cart (1952), simplified figures are isolated within mysterious surroundings, reflecting both European modernism and the metaphysical Surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico.

Similarly, Manyaku Mashilo’s Holding The Dawn in Place (2025) draws on De Chirico’s architectural motifs. Two figures rest within a celestial landscape, anchored by a wall of arches that recedes into the horizon. Drawn from family photo albums and shaped by memory and sensation, Mashilo’s work offers a uniquely South African interpretation of some of De Chirico’s most famous paintings, includingAriadne (1913), The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913), and Melanconia (1912).

The internal spiritual reality explored by many contemporary Southern African artists (as a reinterpretation of Surrealism’s investigation of the dream state), is evident in Andile Dyalvane’s ceramic practice, where vessels act as conduitsfor ancestral knowledge, a vital current of energy that runs through his work.

Influenced by Surrealist masters, Keith Alexander’s photorealist depictions of the Namib desert and abandoned towns like Kolmanskop evoke isolation and decay. These landscapes function as allegories for the collapse of colonial and apartheid systems in South Africa, Namibia, and its former coloniser, Germany, aligning with Surrealism’s broader engagement with resistance and critique.

The Southern African landscape as a site for Surreal investigation is further explored in Thebe Phetogo’s Uncanny Valley series. In his “figurative landscapes,” geological formations begin to resemble living anatomy; Pierneef-esque mountains and valleys rendered as skin and tissue that appear alive yet exposed, as though their surfaces have been turned inside out to reveal the biological systems that sustain them.

Thando Phenyane’s diptychs examine the Black psyche within both local and global contexts, aligning closely with ideas articulated in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952). The tension between internalised perception, projected identity, and the unsettling spaces in between has become central to Phenyane’s practice. In Night Table: Double Inheritance (2025), he recreates Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495-1498), depicting a table laden with symbolic objects and surrounded by masked figures, referencing Black masters whose works often spoke to indigenous African knowledge systems. A miniature totem references the Totem works by South African surreal modernist Cecil Skotnes’ (1926-2009), while a shadow boxer recalls the work of Norman Catherine.

Resistance as lived reality, central to contextualising Southern African Surrealist work, is revisited in Zanele Muholi’s Tanji II, Oslo (2018) from the ongoing Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) series, in which the artist turns the camera on themself to interrogate race, representation, and the politics of the gaze. Their inclusion of found everyday objects is reminiscent of René Magritte’s placement of apples, grapes, and doves in works like Son of Man (1964), The Great War (1964), and Man in a Bowler Hat (1964).

In Zoë (2015), Penny Siopis employs oil, ink, and glue through chance-driven processes to generate associative, emotionally-charged surfaces rooted in individual and collective grief. This kind of automatic creation, a process “liberated” from the constraints of rational composition and figuration, is a stalwart of Surrealist art.

Automatism also informs the practices of Zander Blom and Mankebe Seakgoe. Blom’s Untitled (2016) articulates painting as a site of heightened reflexivity: an elastic and restless consciousness engaged in dialogue with itself, with the canvas functioning as an alter ego that demands continual recalibration. Seakgoe’s deeply intuitive process is often likened to André Breton’s concept of “dictation of thought in the absence of all control.” Beginning with meditation, she allows her ideas to surface freely, often translating them into charcoal works, canvas compositions, or sculptural forms.

The material experimentation of Kamyar Binestharigh, Usha Seejarim, and Nandipha Mtnambo continues this trajectory. Binestharigh’s glue-based paintings rely on gravity and chance, while Seejarim’s Ceci n’ est vraiment pas une pipe (This is Definitely Not a Pipe)(2019) playfully references Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929) using found materials. Mntambo tans her own cow hides and stretches them over mannequins, reminiscent of Meret Oppenheim's (1913-1985) iconic Surrealist work, Object (1836), transforming the familiar into the uncanny

In his Manifesto, Breton references the poet Saint-Pol-Roux, who would place a sign on his door each evening reading: “THE POET IS WORKING.” The Poets Are Working brings together historical and contemporary voices, positioning Southern African Surrealism within a broader lineage while simultaneously demonstrating its continued relevance today.

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[1] Breton, A. (1969) Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by R. Seaver and H.R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. P14.