Abstract and the Absurd celebrates the joyful collision of form, gesture, and imagination. This vibrant exhibition gathers eight artists whose work traverses the space between structure and spontaneity, precision and chaos, logic and play. In their collective dialogue, abstraction and absurdity are not opposites but companions, revealing the beauty that arises when reason yields to instinct and emotion finds its own visual language.
Abstract and the Absurd
Group Exhibition featuring Cyrille Chamayou, Andrew Mogridge, Claire Lichtenstein, David Kuijers, Jack Cohen, Jarrod Berman, SYNC, Mark Swart, Wehrner Lemmer, Andrew Jowdy Collins, Norman Catherine, Thapo Sekaoila, Helen van Stolk and Jasmine Jagger
Candice Berman Gallery, Johannesburg
The exhibition unfolds as a chorus of expressive voices. Each artist interprets the abstract through a personal lens, intuitive, irreverent, and unrestrained. Shapes distort, colours collide, and familiar forms dissolve into moments of humour, tension, and wonder. Together they construct a world that resists explanation and instead invites experience, a space where the irrational becomes sublime.
Among the highlights of the exhibition is Andrew Mogridge’s first collection of original paintings with the gallery. Known for his sharp visual wit and bold composition, Mogridge introduces a new dimension to his practice, embracing paint as a medium of direct emotion and raw immediacy. His works extend the spirit of the absurd through spontaneous mark making and playful abstraction, transforming paradox into poetry.
Cyrille Chamayou and Andrew Jowdy Collins bring powerful gestural energy to the exhibition, their works vibrating with physicality and rhythm. Claire Lichtenstein and Jasmine Jagger explore the dreamlike and surreal, creating painterly spaces that hover between the familiar and the fantastical. David Kuijers and Jarrod Berman harness colour and pattern to convey the vibrancy of contemporary life, while Wehrner Lemmer and Mark Swart bridges the sculptural and the conceptual, grounding the exhibition in material curiosity.
Together these artists form a collective act of creative defiance. Abstract and the Absurd celebrates the spirit of risk and the embrace of the unknown. It invites viewers to release the need for certainty and to find beauty in the unpredictable. In this encounter between the abstract and the absurd, imagination becomes the most truthful expression of reality.
