A major survey exhibition of Theresa-Anne Mackintosh’s work opens at Wits Art Museum

Johannesburg, South Africa

Opens 9 April 2026

Wits Art Museum presents NOW IS NOT FOREVER, a major survey exhibition by South African multidisciplinary artist Theresa-Anne Mackintosh, on view from 9 April to 4 July 2026. The exhibition opens with a public event on Thursday, 9 April 2026 at 18:00.

NOW IS NOT FOREVER marks the first comprehensive institutional survey of Mackintosh’s practice, bringing together sculpture, painting, and selected archival and studio materials to reflect more than three decades of sustained artistic production. The exhibition foregrounds Mackintosh’s long-standing engagement with the human figure and her distinctive approach to translating psychological, emotional, and relational states through form.

Over the course of her career, Mackintosh has worked across painting, sculpture, printmaking, animation, and digital media, while remaining deeply committed to painting as the core of her practice. As writer Sean O’Toole notes, “painting is more than an act; it is a process, a faith, a means of engaging simultaneously with the material and the transcendent.” This understanding of painting as both physical and metaphysical underpins the exhibition, which situates Mackintosh’s painterly practice alongside her sculptural works.

Central to NOW IS NOT FOREVER are key sculptural series, including the iconic Tina figures, human scale fibreglass effigies, and the ceramic baby sculptures first developed in 2005. These imagined figures extend Mackintosh’s painterly language into three dimensions, forming a menagerie of fictional bodies that explore presence, alterity, and repetition. Alongside these works, a focused selection of paintings highlights her intuitive, process-driven engagement with gesture, colour, and surface, where simplified and fragmented figures emerge through layered mark-making. In reference to her work, Gabi Ngcobo stated, “Mackintosh seduces us with visuals and confronts us with the restless pent-up energy locked within each of us.”

In conjunction with her seminal works from the early 2000s, Mackintosh will debut a new series of freestanding sculptures in bronze and steel, alongside new large-scale oil paintings. This expansion signals a renewed material confidence while deepening the dialogue between her two- and three-dimensional practices.

Rather than following a chronological structure, the exhibition is organised thematically, allowing recurring visual strategies and formal concerns to resonate across different periods and media. Selected archival and studio materials, including sketches and preparatory works, are presented in a supporting role, offering insight into Mackintosh’s working processes without diminishing the exhibition’s primary focus on resolved sculptural and painted works.

Reflecting on Mackintosh’s practice, Minette Vari states that, “Her figures are startlingly human, while also sometimes dissolving into the abstract. They are interrupted identities that dwell within the pause state of the unspoken. They fuse with each other and then retreat into an unnamable remoteness. Bodies embrace tentatively, yet there's also a subcutaneous intensity that belies the quieter moments. Mackintosh's figures also seem eerily complicit in each other's unspoken plight.” This is evident throughout NOW IS NOT FOREVER, which positions Mackintosh’s work within broader conversations around contemporary figurative practice and the relatability of abstraction in figuration, while underscoring her sustained contribution to South African art.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of walkabouts and public engagements, creating opportunities for deeper conversations with the work and its themes.

Theresa-Anne Mackintosh obtained her BA (1990) and MA (1995) in Fine Art from the University of Pretoria and has exhibited extensively in South Africa and internationally. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections.

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