Come Again | Lady Skollie, Erin Chaplin, Teresa Kutala Firmino & Sanell Aggenbach
Picasso, Rousseau, Monet and Braque all make an appearance in Come Again – not literally, but through the shapes, colours and compositions four South African artists have chosen to pick apart and make their own.
Everard Read Cape Town
Lady Skollie, Erin Chaplin, Teresa Kutala Firmino and Sanell Aggenbach each begin with art history, but none of them treats it as untouchable. Cubist faces, tropical jungles, still lifes, bold colour and distorted bodies are borrowed, shifted and sometimes pushed into much stranger territory.
The exhibition is also interested in who gets remembered. The familiar story of twentieth-century Modernism is dominated by male artists, while women were often written into it as models, muses or supporting figures. Come Again approaches that history with a sharper sense of humour: these artists are not asking permission to enter the picture. They are taking the bits they want and changing the terms.
Sanell Aggenbach has been doing this for years. Her work regularly raids art history for material, from sculpture associated with Michelangelo and Henry Moore to the imagery of Andy Warhol. She is particularly good at taking something established and serious and shifting it slightly off balance, often through parody and a distinctly female point of view.
Erin Chaplin’s paintings begin closer to home, with flowers, fruit, portraits and still life. She is drawn to the fact that these things do not stay fresh for long. Fruit bruises, flowers wilt, faces change. Her work often sits in that brief space between beauty and decay, using unexpected colour and thickly worked paint to stop the image from becoming too polished.
Teresa Kutala Firmino builds scenes from fragments gathered across different sources: photographs, newspapers, historical documents and social media. Her paintings can feel almost theatrical, with figures arranged inside compressed interiors where past and present sit alongside one another. Much of her work grows out of questions around memory, family history and the lasting effects of war and displacement.
Lady Skollie brings the exhibition its most unruly energy. Working with ink, watercolour, crayon, printmaking and performance, she has built a visual world of exaggerated figures, symbols and bodies that can be funny, confrontational and deliberately provocative. Art history, sexuality, religion and power all tend to arrive in the same room.
Seen together, the four artists make Come Again feel less like a tribute to Modernism than a raid on its cupboard. The references are familiar, but the ownership has changed.
About the Artists
Lady Skollie
Lady Skollie, also known as Laura Windvogel, works across drawing, printmaking and performance. Known for her bold figures and sharp humour, she has received both the FNB Art Prize and the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Arts.
Erin Chaplin
Erin Chaplin is a self-taught painter whose work moves between still life, portraiture and abstraction. Flowers, fruit and the passing of time recur throughout her paintings, often alongside deliberately unexpected colour.
Teresa Kutala Firmino
Teresa Kutala Firmino is a Johannesburg-based multimedia artist working with painting, photography and performance. Her work draws on personal and collective history, often bringing together archival material, memory and imagined scenes.
Sanell Aggenbach
Sanell Aggenbach works across painting, printmaking and sculpture. Her practice frequently revisits well-known art-historical references, using humour and subversion to look at them from a different perspective.
Images courtesy of Everard Read Cape Town and participating artists.
Exhibition Details
Exhibition
Come Again
Artists
Lady Skollie
Erin Chaplin
Teresa Kutala Firmino
Sanell Aggenbach
Exhibition Dates
7 October – 28 October 2026
Opening Reception
Wednesday, 7 October at 18:00
Location
Everard Read Cape Town
3 Portswood Road
V&A Waterfront
Cape Town
