Welgemeend Art Month announces the title and focus on their anchor exhibition for 2025 

4 Jul 2025

Drawing on the extensive Kilbourn Collection of modern and contemporary South African art, the exhibition In en Om Ons/ In and Around Us explores what it means to be an artist working after the advent of photography. The exhibition – a cornerstone of Welgemeend Art Month, now in its 12th year – will feature select paintings and photographs from the Kilbourn Collection that explore ideas of subjectivity, consciousness, home, play and work.  

The artist selection ranges from important modernists Enslin du Plessis, David Goldblatt, Wolf Kibel, Francois Krige, Jürgen Schadeberg and Maude Sumner to contemporary painters Hugh Byrne, Norman Catherine, Richard Mudariki, Deborah Poynton and Asha Zero, as well as photographers Lien Botha, Lunga Ntila and Jo Ractliffe. The exhibition will explore how photographers and painters share ways of seeing and recording the world, but just as often diverge in these portrayals.

In en Om Ons/ In and Around Us will also include a concise selection of contemporary sculpture from the Kilbourn Collection. The selection emphasises shared interests in form, time and abstraction. Featured artists include Juliet Armstrong, Dominique Edwards, Robert Hodgins, Warren Maroon, Hylton Nel and Rina Stutzer, among many. 

Frank and Lizelle Kilbourn will this year collaborate with writer and curator Sean O’Toole in developing the focus and theme for the 2025 exhibition at Welgemeend Art Month. 

Sean O’Toole: “It is a great pleasure to think and play with the Kilbourn Collection, an encyclopaedic collection of South African art assembled with great enthusiasm over many years. In developing the exhibition, I returned to a first love, photography, of which the Kilbourn Collection holds a surprisingly diverse amount. In en Om Ons/ In and Around Us looks at how photography – introduced to the Cape in 1846 – has reshaped ways of seeing, recording and representing the world. The exhibition explores visual and thematic correspondences, as well as fundamental differences, between the two mediums. The exhibition will also spotlight the Kilbourn Collection’s holdings of contemporary sculpture, presenting work with shared formal and conceptual affinities.” 
 
The 64 works from the Boerneef Collection, which usually hang in Welgemeend, will be exhibited at Strauss & Co in parallel to Welgemeend Art Month throughout the month of August.