The Norval Foundation is proud to announce the opening of Irma Stern: A life of displacement, a landmark series of exhibitions tracing the extraordinary life, journeys, and artistic legacy of one of South Africa’s most celebrated modernists, Irma Stern. Drawing exclusively on material from her extensive archive and Collection, this opening exhibition of the series forms part of a new unique multiyear collaboration between the Norval Foundation, the Irma Stern Trust and Nedbank.

This partnership emerges at a pivotal moment for Stern’s legacy, following the temporary closure of the Irma Stern Museum at The Firs in 2025, the historic home where Stern lived and worked for almost four decades. It ensures that Stern’s work remains available to view during the course of the Irma Stern Museum’s closure.

An agreement between the Irma Stern Trust and the Norval Foundation establishes a dedicated programme of four exhibitions over the next two years that will explore Stern’s life, travels, archives, and collection, under the rubric Irma Stern: A life of displacement. This ambitious program will be sponsored and presented by Nedbank. The series of exhibitions brings together important works and archival material that illuminate various thematics:

• geopolitical upheavals, war and antisemitism that shaped Stern’s early years
• Stern’s sense of cultural and physical displacement
• the search for identity and artistic expression
• the importance of her African journeys and cross cultural encounters.

Visitors will encounter rarely seen works, travel artefacts from Stern’s significant personal collection, personal documents, paintings and works on paper created across the many landscapes Stern inhabited — from Berlin to Zanzibar.