SMAC Gallery was born in Stellenbosch, a location just a few miles from Cape Town best known for its vineyards, almost by chance, as recalled by Director Baylon Sandri
A career building art gallery for emerging talents
SMAC Gallery was first established in 2007, a period in which African art and culture had become popular worldwide especially thanks to the work of photographers. They explored the continent and brought back to their homelands examples of an unknown aesthetic: wild panoramas, colorful clothing, fine objects.
SMAC Gallery was born in Stellenbosch, a location just a few miles from Cape Town best known for its vineyards, almost by chance, as recalled by Director Baylon Sandri: «I was involved in building renovation projects and one day I ran into this exhibition space. At the time I was already organizing art exhibitions as a hobby, because my parents are collectors and we were friends with local artists. Since I did not have a dedicated space – I would do exhibitions either on wine farms or some specific building – I started using the one I had found. As we got to organize more and more exhibitions, we decided to turn it into an art gallery».
Different perspectives on the canons and history of South African art
Even though at the beginning Baylon did not have a precise goal, but was simply exhibiting artists he personally knew, SMAC Gallery’s identity was already taking shape. All the artists were South African and among them were also young emerging talents. «They were all in some way offering different perspectives on the canons and history of South African art, which is complicated. This is why we also did a lot of historical exhibitions».
As the activity of the gallery became more and more intense, Baylon and his staff decided to expand towards bigger cities, thus opening another exhibition space in Cape Town in 2011, followed by Johannesburg in 2016.
The growth of the gallery also led to a development in the careers of the young artists who were working with them. «Some of the young artists we had discovered became names of the South African artistic panorama. It was at this point that we embraced what is still today our biggest goal: to identify and help emerging African artists grow and boost their career. We chose to become a career building art gallery rather than working with only established artists».
Such a choice also influenced SMAC Gallery’s approach to art fairs. «We have a lot of younger artists, we do participate in a lot of fairs worldwide, but we prefer smaller ones, where emerging talents can find a spot and a voice». The gallery’s art fair participation includes Art Basel Miami Beach and The Armory Show in the USA, Artissima and Miart in Italy, as well as Art Brussels in Belgium.
SMAC Gallery: the exhibition spaces located in Cape Town and Johannesburg
Nowadays, the exhibition spaces located in Cape Town and Johannesburg carry on a precise program, with the first being dedicated to «more ambitious projects», while Stellenbosch has become a free open space.
When it comes to organizing a show, SMAC Gallery’s policy is to cooperate with artists, deciding together what project to work on: «We give our artists the possibility to freely choose what to do and which space they want to do it in. We like for them to do solo shows, but this is not a mandatory requirement. We generally use our major spaces – Cape Town and Stellenbosch – for our artists’ solo shows, but we also host group exhibitions and we work with outside curators as well».
SMAC: group exhibitions
According to Baylon, group exhibitions are the most effective means to look for young talents and this is why SMAC Gallery hosts at least one per year. «Often young artists come from places where it is not simple to do studio visits. Despite maintaining a curatorial footprint, our group shows allow us to explore new talents and find a way to start working with them».
The Cape Town branch offers a residency program for emerging talents from all over the world. «We invite at least three young artists every year from both inside and outside Africa to work with us. Not all of them become permanent partners of the gallery, but nonetheless we do offer to all them the possibility to organize a solo show here».
When it comes to foreign artists, SMAC Gallery always looks for a connection between them and Africa: «Liking their works is not enough to start a partnership, even though this also plays a role. There should be something that links the artist to us and to Africa».
Cape Town: Bonolo Kavula
Bonolo Kavula is at her second solo show with SMAC Gallery. Entitled Soft Landing, her exhibition emphasizes play and the circularity of ideas and memories, targeting the tangential experiments that came with the production of Kavula’s solo show at the Cape Town Norval Foundation after winning the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize 2022, a contemporary art prize for artists of the African continent and its diaspora.
«The process of Kavula’s body of work requires a lot of math. She achieves the precision of her artworks with the help of an A1 green cutting mat that has a guiding grid of measurements. There is a kind of circuitous trajectory in the process of making the work that requires power negotiations with the material. A kind of reconversion that is first generated from transforming the geometric shweshwe patterns into tiny, punctured discs that become glued onto threaded strands: an oscillatory process. The intertextual connections in Soft Landing, pronounced materially and conceptually by Kavula’s abstractions and threads of memory, serve as markers of time-space infinitudes. The body of work figuratively and literally glues threads of kinship histories».
Cape Town: Ledelle Moe
For her first solo exhibition with SMAC Gallery, Ledelle Moe is the protagonist of what is called «artist’s room», with a large sculptural installation named Fold.
«That is just a scale of the final work, which is going to be ten times larger. It is a human-like figure caught in what may be interpreted as either temporary or permanent repose. It is a body, a shell and a mound, all at the same time. Thus, It seems to be morphing into its own medium of concrete and steel, its structural seams are exposed while its boundaries remain uncertain. Swaying between shape and shapelessness, Fold appears to be melting into the space of the gallery while insisting on being present with its particular kind of heavy materiality. It is neither an emphatic marker of space and time nor an exercise in deconstruction, despite its modular steel structure. It offers a space away from the linearity of history, a site of refuge, a retreat from the certainty of its narratives».
Johannesburg: Kate Gottgens
The Johannesburg exhibition space is currently hosting the solo exhibition of one of SMAC Gallery’s senior artists, Kate Gottgens. Born in South Africa in 1965, Kate Gottgens is a painter whose works have also been exhibited in Europe and in the United States.
This show, entitled The Swimmer, is based on John Cheever’s homonymous short story, published in 1964, which focuses on the relevance of swimming pools in the life of the suburban middle-class.
«Followers of Gottgens’ work will be familiar with the visual of scantily dressed figures, features obscured, lounging around a pool of blue or deep green. It defines early memories of pleasure and nonchalance, but at the same time it could be a space of discomfort – our first experiences with exposed bodies, conspicuous wealth and transgressive acts witnessed by innocent eyes. As we are presented with snippets of late nights, shadows of people, and sketches of chairs, employing the power of suggestion, she asks us to wonder, and to cast ourselves as a lost swimmer in this narrative. And in so doing we are taken on a journey into our own suburban memories of midsummer balmy nights, Christmas beetles zooming haphazardly towards the nearest lantern, and petrichor rising from the soaked pavers of a flash summer storm that bathes the dust in new life».
Stellenbosch: Amy Rusch
In the exhibition space where it all began, SMAC Gallery is now hosting Seeing with a Listening Ear, the solo show of a young female South African artist, Amy Rusch.
Born in 1990, she uses waste products, such as plastic bags, to create artistic tapestries, playing with the materials to either hide or reveal their original nature: «This is a typical example of what we do in Stellenbosch and of the significance this space has still today for young emerging talents».
SMAC Gallery
SMAC Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in South Africa, with three exhibition spaces located respectively in Stellenbosch, Cape Town and Johannesburg. The gallery aims at scouting young African talents, but also works with established and foreign artists.
