A face seems to shake itself apart, a hand grips a bedsheet, and figures hover over landscapes made with earth from the Eastern Cape. Three artists find different ways to put difficult feelings into images.
THK Gallery, Cape Town
Of Such a Kind. To Paint is to Attempt | Group Exhibition at THK Gallery
28 October – 31 December 2026
Of Such a Kind. To Paint is to Attempt, a group exhibition at THK Gallery in Cape Town, features work by Talut Kareem, Kayla Howie and Masindi Nafisa Mbolekwa. Through painting and charcoal drawing, the three artists consider how the human body can communicate experiences that are difficult to put into words.
The exhibition takes its title from the 16th-century French writer Michel de Montaigne, who called his writings essais, meaning attempts. With titles such as Of Friendship, Of Pedantry and Of Experience, his essays tested ideas from different angles without necessarily reaching a conclusion. Painting, the exhibition suggests, can work in much the same way. An artist arranges colour, shape and texture in an attempt to convey something of their own experience to another person.
A hand tightly grasping a sheet, a head thrashing from side to side, a lone figure with one knee drawn to the chest — these are gestures through which the artists give physical form to feelings of distress, vulnerability, isolation and longing.
Talut Kareem’s charcoal drawings present faces, heads and bodies caught in restless motion. Features multiply, blur and distort, giving his figures an almost frantic energy. Beneath their exaggerated expressions lie feelings of doubt, guilt and unease. Reflecting on this vulnerability, Kareem admits: “I think I am losing my empathetic self and I’m realising I wasn’t prepared for that.”
In contrast, Kayla Howie’s figures are almost motionless. Her intimate self-portraits show bodies in withdrawn postures, with faces turned away from the viewer. There is a tension in these paintings between the desire for human contact and the discomfort of being seen. Averted gazes, exposed skin and tightly held gestures suggest emotions that remain unspoken. Even when the figure is reduced to a fragment, its posture carries the weight of the encounter.
Masindi Nafisa Mbolekwa’s figures occupy a space somewhere between movement and stillness. Suspended against imagined landscapes, they appear to float through shifting areas of light and shadow. Working with oil paint and earth, Mbolekwa incorporates soil collected from Macacuma, a small village in the Eastern Cape. The material connects his paintings directly to the place he comes from, while loosely mapped shapes recall fragments of memory, home and displacement. His work draws on the contradictions and complexities of his personal experience of blackness.
Seen together, the three approaches offer strikingly different treatments of the human figure: Kareem’s bodies seem to unravel, Howie’s withdraw into themselves, while Mbolekwa’s drift through landscapes that carry traces of home. Each artist uses the physical qualities of their medium to make personal experiences visible, even when those experiences resist straightforward explanation.
The exhibition is accompanied by a text by writer and curator Nkgopoleng Moloi, who draws on Montaigne’s essays and the philosophical idea of qualia — the particular feeling of an experience — to consider what painting can communicate about another person’s inner life.
Exhibition Dates | 28 October – 31 December 2026
THK Gallery, 52 Waterkant Street, Cape Town.
Images courtesy of THK Gallery and participating artists.
