The Poets Are Working

24 Apr 2026

A landmark group exhibition situating Southern African art within a global Surrealist lineage

Strauss & Co and the Kilbourn Collection were invited by Southern Guild to collaborate in a group exhibition focused on Surrealism. Curated by Southern Guild’s Anna-Michelle Roux, and titled The Poets Are Working, the exhibition brings together modern and contemporary works from Southern Africa that might all under the broad banner of Surrealism. Historical works by Fred Page, Alexis Preller and Keith Alexander, amongst others, anchor and contextualise works by emerging and established contemporary artists.

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Kamyar Bineshtarig, Tears Archive ; Kilbourn Collection

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The centenary of Surrealism was celebrated in 2024, commemorating the first publication of poet André Breton’s landmark first Surrealist Manifesto in France. Breton’s famous dictum defining Surrealism was that it should be ‘pure psychic automatism’ – a creative process in which conscious interference should be kept to a minimum to allow unconscious expression. Contrary to many misconceptions over the years, this was not a rejection of rationality. Instead, under the growing influence of psychoanalysis in Europe at the time, the approach entailed the devising of artistic methods that would allow unconscious impulses to be accessed and used in art. This was understood in much the same way as psychoanalysis tried to get patients to access their unconscious lives to heal their psyches.

Surrealism therefore favoured dreamworlds, automatic or unconscious means of expression, and views of alternative realities. In the period between World Wars in Europe the approach was revolutionary and persuasive – in much the same ways as artists can be seen to respond to the present moment of crisis.

Strauss & Co have a history of curation and education about Surrealism in the South African context. visual art. In 2022, Strauss & Co themed a landmark auction on the theme of Surrealism, in part taking a lead from the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of the previous year, Surrealism Beyond Borders. The international nature of the interest in the method was foregrounded in the Met show, with the likes of Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington alongside recognised European surrealists like Dali, Tanguy, and Magritte. The 2022 Strauss & Co auction expanded the value of the techniques and approach of surrealism to South African contemporary artists like Kentridge, Geers and cover lot artist Keith Alexander, alongside modernists like Fred Page, whose whimsical, and somehow sinister, explicitly surrealist work reappears in the current exhibition.

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One prominent South African artist who featured in this sale, Alexis Preller, would be celebrated in Strauss & Co’s first venture into the London market in 2024. The private sale and loan exhibition of many of Preller’s works was the first time he had been exhibited in London, where he trained in his youth. Head curator Dr Alastair Meredith posed the question of whether Preller could be meaningfully reconsidered as a Surrealist, with many of his works presenting cosmological and idiosyncratically symbolic themes and subjects. The debate continues, with Preller having distanced himself from the idea. 

The current exhibition takes up that idea in recontextualising the roster of contemporary artists and works in the light or earlier work recognisably drawing on Surrealist themes and tropes.  The Poets Are Working explores how contemporary artists reinterpret Surrealist strategies – from dislocation and symbolism to automatism and the uncanny – within distinctly Southern African contexts.

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The previously mentioned historical works are situated in conversation with exhibiting artists Zander Blom, Dominique Cheminais, Stuart Dods, Andile Dyalvane, Manyaku Mashilo, Zanele Muholi, Thando Phenyane, Thebe Phetogo, Mankebe Seakgoe, Usha Seejarim, Marlene Steyn, and Paul Wallington. The exhibition also includes specially commissioned works by Kamyar Binestharigh, Jozua Gerrard, Justine Mahoney, and Nandipha Mntambo, each extending Surrealism’s material and psychological concerns through distinct practices.

For example, Binestharigh’s glue-based paintings unfold through gravity and chance, while, Seejarim contributes a work playfully and explicitly referencing a Surrealist masterpiece, Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929). Her work Ceci n’est vraiment pas une pipe (This is Definitely Not a Pipe) (2019), uses only found materials, and coincides with her forthcoming solo exhibition, Used, inaugurating Southern Guild’s New York gallery from 24 April to 17 May 2026.

The exhibition considers how the subconscious continues to shape artistic production, whether through dream imagery, embodied transformation, spiritual transmission, or material experimentation. Iconic surrealist motifs are reimagined, while broader themes of identity, memory, landscape, and resistance emerge. The Poets Are Working situates Southern African Surrealism within a global lineage while asserting its ongoing relevance. In his Surrealist Manifesto, Breton references the poet Saint-Pol-Roux, who would place a sign on his door each evening reading: “THE POET IS WORKING.” Now providing the title for the exhibition, that work continues.

Thando Pheyanye , Double Inheretance; Kilbourn Collection