Art Exhibitions

Oliewenhuis Art Museum is proud to present PREKARIA, a solo exhibition by Kilmany-Jo Liversage, on show in the Main Building, from 9 October until 23 November 2025.

 

Kilmany-Jo Liversage creates portraits that sit at the blurry boundary between fine art and urban art. Adopting the urban art language allows her to update, renew and challenge the conventions of painting, though her rendering of female subjects is inspired by Renaissance era portraiture. Her artworks also reference digitised mass production and a futuristic post-human world. The result is a series of brightly coloured large-scale paintings, evoking the street, art history and the future.

 

The idea of “the gaze” lies at the heart of much of Liversage’s work. In feminist art theory, the concept refers to the long-standing dominance of the male gaze: for centuries, art largely depicted women as subjects to be looked at, recorded, and consumed through male eyes. This created a profound imbalance of power - one that reduced women to objects of observation rather than active participants.

 

Liversage’s position as a woman working within portraiture subtly shifts this paradigm. Her large-scale faces confront viewers directly, their unflinching stares reversing the roles and demanding engagement. Instead of passively receiving attention, her subjects hold the gaze, establishing a dialogue that carries a distinctly feminist undercurrent. This thread has consistently run through her practice for nearly two decades. She has developed a distinct visual language that combines the intimacy of portraiture with the raw energy of urban mark-making. Borrowing from street art practices such as tagging and aerosol spraying, she translates these gestures onto canvas, transforming them into symbols that hint at broader narratives of contemporary life.

 

About her still life paintings, she has the following to say; “I paint flowers as a reference to objectification. With hints of female anatomy and subversive organic shapes created by the spray can and paintbrush, I have created an urban take on the classical still-life painting.”

 

Kilmany-Jo Liversage (b. 1973) lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2000, she obtained a B.Tech Fine Arts Degree at the Free State Technikon (now CUT).

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