This retrospective exhibition of Nel Erasmus' paintings aims to refocus attention and pay tribute to an artist whose contribution to South African art is immense.

Bringing together different periods in Erasmus’ artistic career the exhibition includes formative and student work from the late 1940s and early 1950s, as well as a number of Parisian paintings. Works representative of her formalist/Post-Cubist abstract period of the 1960s and the emotionally revealing and expressive paintings of the 1970s are exhibited together with works from the 1980s onwards.

Erasmus legacy includes her years as the first female director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) and later as an art advisor during which time she contributed to the addition and acquisition of invaluable artworks to public and corporate collections in South Africa. In particular she added to the highly acclaimed international modern and contemporary collection of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Most importantly, as a painter, Erasmus is one of the earliest exponents of abstract art in South Africa. Since the 1950s she achieved substantial success both locally and abroad. Erasmus exhibited her works for the first time in Paris in 1955. In the same year her work also formed part of the Salon Des Réalités Nouvelles, Musée d’Art Moderne. Although Erasmus was never a ‘popular’ painter, her work received much critical acclaim and she was the only South African artist to be included in Michel Seuphor’s seminal survey of abstraction: Abstract Painting: 50 Years of Accomplishment, published in 1964. In 1961, she was invited to exhibit at the 2nd Paris Biennale at the Musée d’Art Moderne and in 1965 she represented South Africa at the São Paulo Biennale.

This exhibition is accompanied by an artist monograph published by SMAC Art Gallery, with text by Antoinette Glatthaar-Theron, Linda Stupart, Elza Miles and a foreword by Deon Viljoen.

26 October - 18 February