Luiza Cachalia Gilded Exhibition Cape Town opens on Sunday, 3 May 2026 at SMAC+ Projects in Cape Town City Centre, presenting a compelling new body of work that interrogates femininity, representation, and the enduring structures of patriarchy.

SMAC is pleased to present Gilded, a solo exhibition by Luiza Cachalia. The exhibition opens at 11h00 at SMAC+ Project Space, located at 65A Shortmarket Street, and runs for one month.

Cachalia’s practice has long examined how cultural residue informs personal and societal constructions of gender. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of woman as “Other,” Gilded shifts its focus toward figures who exist within patriarchal systems rather than outside them. These are women who inhabit what Cachalia frames as a “glittering cage,” where expressions of resistance are repackaged as aspirational identity.

The exhibition draws on contemporary cinematic portrayals of historically loaded female figures, including Marie Antoinette, Princess Diana, and Princess Margaret. Through these subjects, Cachalia examines how femininity is aestheticised, commodified, and circulated within visual culture.

Her paintings deliberately flatten cinematic illusion. Thin washes of pigment create mask-like surfaces, contrasted with textured impasto in details such as embroidery, cosmetics, and cigarette smoke. This tension between control and collapse exposes the instability beneath these carefully constructed identities.

In Gilded, emotional disquiet surfaces through vacant expressions and fragmented forms. Cachalia reveals how contemporary femininity continues to operate as spectacle, where beauty, adornment, and performance function as both tools of agency and mechanisms of control. As subversion is absorbed into aesthetic consumption, the structures it resists become further embedded within visual culture.