Opening | First Thursday

Eclectica Contemporary presents After the First Look, an exhibition featuring Nedia Were, Bob-nosa Uwagboe, Loyiso Mkize, Olamide Ogunade, Ebuka Pascale Agudiegwu, Damilola Onosowobo Marcus, Ayogu Kingsley, Siyabonga Fani, and Siyanda Sipolo.

The first encounter is rarely the most honest one.

We like to believe that recognition is immediate, that we understand an image the moment it reveals itself to us. Portraiture, in particular, invites this confidence. A face appears, and with it, a sense of access, identity, emotion, narrative. We look, and we decide.

But looking is not the same as seeing.

After the First Look returns to a selection of portraits that have already entered the world, works that have been exhibited, circulated, and, in some cases, quickly absorbed into the rhythms of the market. Their initial moment has passed. The urgency of first contact has settled. What remains is something quieter, and often more revealing.

Removed from their original context, these works resist the conclusions once placed upon them. The conditions of their first appearance, whether within the speed of an art fair, the framing of a thematic exhibition, or the expectations of a commercial environment, inevitably shaped how they were received. In that first instance, the viewer’s gaze is rarely neutral. It is informed by trend, by desire, by assumption.

To encounter these portraits again is to confront the instability of that gaze.

Time alters perception. What once felt immediate may now feel constructed. What seemed decorative may reveal tension. What was overlooked may begin to insist on itself. In this return, the portrait shifts, from image to presence, from surface to something more resistant and unresolved.

There is also a quieter tension at play, the afterlife of the artwork itself. Some of these works were quickly claimed, affirmed by the market as desirable and complete. Others remained, suspended in a different kind of visibility, seen, but not secured. This exhibition does not attempt to resolve that divide. Instead, it places these works back into view under the same conditions, asking whether value, like perception, is ever fixed.

After the First Look is not concerned with repetition for its own sake. It is an insistence on looking again, more slowly, more critically, and perhaps more honestly. If the first encounter is shaped by instinct, this second asks for something else, attention, doubt, and a willingness to let the image exceed what was first understood.

Because what we see the second time is never the same.

And neither are we.

Join us for the opening Thursday, 4 June 2026, as part of First Thursdays 18h00 – 20h00 56 Church Street, Cape Town City Centre, 8001