Breaking waves, weathered rocks and the changing colours of fynbos have shaped Nola Muller’s paintings for decades. Alongside her landscapes, Michele Koch’s ceramics preserve the impressions of lace, horsehair and handwritten messages in fired clay.
The Cape Gallery, Cape Town
Familiar Places | Nola Muller & Michele Koch at The Cape Gallery
5–28 November 2026
Familiar Places, an exhibition at The Cape Gallery in Cape Town, presents paintings by Nola Muller alongside handmade ceramics by Michele Koch. Muller draws on a lifetime spent along the Cape coastline and in its mountains, capturing the colours, textures and shifting moods of the natural world in watercolour and oils.
A longboard surfer since the 1960s, Muller has spent decades observing the movement of breaking waves. Her walks through the fynbos-covered slopes of Table Mountain National Park have given her an equally intimate understanding of indigenous plants, rock formations and changing light.
Describing her frequent stops along Chapmans Peak Pass, Muller writes:
“If I pull up to the roadside on Chapmans Peak Pass, it is not because of a puncture, it is because I so often stop on my bicycle to observe the foamy pulse between the sea and the cliffs.”
Her paintings capture the dramatic structure of boulders, the colours of indigenous flowers and the movement of water. Muller sees little reason to distort what she observes, allowing the natural forms themselves to determine her compositions.
Reviewing her first exhibition in 1978, Argus critic Eldred Green described Muller as a hedonist who takes pleasure in her environment. Nearly five decades later, her attention to the landscape remains undiminished.
Accompanying the paintings are ceramics by Michele Koch, whose practice centres on the tactile pleasure of working directly with clay.
“My hands are happiest when they are in clay,” says Koch.
Her handmade pieces are fired to stoneware temperatures, with surfaces decorated using imprinted messages, lace and horsehair. These impressions become permanent features of the finished objects, preserving traces of the materials and gestures used in making them. Koch creates pieces intended to give everyday occasions a sense of significance, with personal memories held in the fired clay.
Across painting and ceramics, the exhibition draws attention to the details that might otherwise pass unnoticed: the movement of water against rock, the colour of a flowering plant, or the delicate impression of lace pressed into clay.
Exhibition Opening | Thursday, 5 November 2026 | 17:00
The exhibition will be opened by Karoline Hanks, coordinator of the civic NGO projectnoordhoeked, as part of First Thursday.
Exhibition closes | Saturday, 28 November 2026
The Cape Gallery, 60 Church Street, Cape Town.
RSVP: web@capegallery.co.za
Images courtesy of The Cape Gallery and participating artists.
