Familiar rooms turn strangely empty, colour spills across the canvas and ceramic forms resemble remnants of another time. Three artists question how much of what we see is shaped by memory and experience.

99 Loop Gallery, Cape Town

Tell Me What You See Around You | Group Exhibition at 99 Loop

31 October – 28 November 2026

Tell Me What You See Around You, a group exhibition at 99 Loop Gallery in Cape Town, features paintings by Nazeer Jappie and Olivia Botha alongside ceramic wall pieces by Michael Bräuer. Working with very different materials and approaches, the three artists consider how memory, personal experience and imagination shape our perception of the world.

Nazeer Jappie’s figurative oil paintings occupy an uneasy space between the ordinary and the surreal. Domestic interiors and familiar surroundings are rendered in restrained colours and sparse compositions, where the absence of people can feel as significant as their presence. Time seems suspended in these scenes, giving everyday places an unsettling quality. Beneath their apparent stillness lie questions about mortality, memory and the strange nature of ordinary existence.

Olivia Botha’s paintings are charged with movement. Thick applications of paint and oil stick build up into energetic surfaces, where sweeping gestures and expressive marks suggest forms drawn from the natural world. Her abstract compositions carry a strong physical presence, with colour and movement becoming ways of working through questions of identity and personal change.

Michael Bräuer works with clay, creating ceramic wall pieces shaped through an immediate, largely unplanned engagement with the material. His forms recall those found in nature, with irregular contours and organic structures that could belong to ancient geological remains or objects from an imagined future. Their ambiguous appearance makes it difficult to place them within any recognisable time.

The contrast between Jappie’s carefully controlled interiors, Botha’s expansive gestures and Bräuer’s instinctively shaped ceramics gives the exhibition its tension. Each artist offers a different way of looking at the familiar, revealing how readily the world around us can shift through the filter of individual experience.

Exhibition Opening | Saturday, 31 October 2026 | 11:00–14:00
Meet the artists at the opening. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome.

Exhibition closes | Saturday, 28 November 2026

99 Loop Gallery, 99 Loop Street, Cape Town.

Images courtesy of 99 Loop Gallery and participating artists.