PREKARIA
OLIEWENHUIS ART MUSEUM 2025
a solo exhibition by Kilmany-Jo Liversage
9 October - 23 November 2025
PREKARIA | Acrylic, aerosol spray and marker on canvas | 150cm x 150cm.
From 9 October to 23 November 2025, the Oliewenhuis Art Museum in Bloemfontein hosts PREKARIA, the first museum solo exhibition by acclaimed Cape Town-based artist Kilmany-Jo Liversage. Presented by WORLDART, the exhibition will later travel to Cape Town, where it will be on view at WORLDART from 4 to 20 December 2025. This exhibition marks a significant homecoming for Liversage, who was born and educated in Bloemfontein. A graduate of the Free State Technikon (now CUT), she studied fine art in the very classroom where she began her schooling at Eunice Primary. Returning to exhibit in the city of her youth, she brings with her a body of work that fuses urban grit with painterly refinement — an unmistakable signature that has earned her recognition at art fairs and exhibitions across the world.
A FUSION OF STREET AND STUDIO
Liversage’s portraits occupy the compelling borderland between fine art and urban art. They are monumental faces built from layered paint, luminous colour, and the raw immediacy of graffiti. Spray-painted gestures — the kind more likely to be seen on a city wall — pulse across classical compositions inspired by Renaissance portraiture. The result is a visual language that bridges centuries: the reverence of Botticelli and Titian colliding with the urgency of the contemporary street. In her own words, the artist finds inspiration “in the raw pulse of city streets” and in “the soul-stirring depth of the human form” so masterfully rendered by the Renaissance painters. Her large-scale canvases embody both impulses — the luminous elegance of old-world portraiture and the defiant spontaneity of urban mark-making. This hybrid aesthetic is not simply a stylistic experiment; it is a statement. By merging classical techniques with graffiti, Liversage challenges traditional hierarchies of art and representation. She reclaims portraiture as a space where women are not objects of the gaze but active participants in it.
THE GAZE REIMAGINED
At the heart of PREKARIA lies Liversage’s ongoing engagement with “the gaze” — a concept rooted in feminist art theory. Historically, women in art were painted to be looked at, framed by the eyes of men. Liversage subverts this history with subjects who meet the viewer headon. Her women are not passive muses but commanding presences. Their gaze is steady, unflinching, even confrontational. “By merging the ethereal grandeur of masters like Botticelli or Titian with the unapologetic edge of street murals,” she explains, “I aim to empower the feminine gaze… transforming passive observation into a revolutionary dialogue between past and present.” In her hands, portraiture becomes an act of reclamation — a challenge to centuries of visual imbalance. Each work insists on agency, beauty, and visibility on its own terms.
LAYERS OF MEANING AND MARK
What makes these portraits so alive is not only their gaze but their surface. Layers of paint are built up and scraped back, interrupted by bursts of spray-painted graffiti marks. These layers capture a tension between control and chaos, tradition and street, permanence and erasure. Every mark in PREKARIA has purpose — yet each carries a sense of fragility. As the artist describes, the very act of spray-painting is precarious: a method prone to chance, impermanence, and change. The exhibition’s title, PREKARIA, draws from the Latin root of “precarious” and embodies the instability inherent in urban art. “Each mark is a gamble,” she says, “a momentary assertion of presence in a world that erodes and overwrites.” That tension — between creation and destruction, vulnerability and persistence — gives her paintings their pulse. Her canvases do not hide their construction; they celebrate it. The drips, scrawls, and luminous veils of paint are as much part of the story as the faces that emerge through them.
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN STRENGTH AND FRAGILITY
The concept of precariousness extends beyond technique to theme. Liversage’s women exist in a world of flux, where beauty and identity are constantly rewritten. Her graffiti gestures act as “visual static,” echoing the instability of urban life and the fragility of representation itself. Yet within that instability is a kind of resilience — a refusal to vanish quietly. In PREKARIA, fragility becomes strength. The feminine presence is not portrayed as delicate or ornamental but as dynamic and self-aware. The tension between what is built and what might be lost becomes a metaphor for womanhood, creativity, and existence itself.
AN ARTIST OF GLOBAL REACH AND LOCAL ROOTS
Liversage’s career spans nearly two decades and includes exhibitions in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brussels, and Singapore. She has participated in major art fairs worldwide and has painted large-scale murals in cities across the globe, including at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Her work is represented in significant corporate and private collections, including those of Nando’s, the Spier Arts Trust, Absa Gallery, and Rand Merchant Bank. Yet despite her international reach, PREKARIA feels deeply personal — a conversation between where she began and where her art has taken her. It is both a return and a reinvention.
EXHIBITION DETAILS
PREKARIA will open at Oliewenhuis Art Museum on Thursday, 9 October 2025 at 18:00, with a walkabout by the artist on Friday, 10 October at 11:00. The exhibition runs until 23 November 2025, before travelling to WORLDART, Cape Town from 4 to 20 December 2025. Admission is free, and all are welcome.
In PREKARIA, Kilmany-Jo Liversage redefines what it means to paint — and to be seen. Her work invites us into that precarious space between beauty and disruption, mastery and instinct, control and release. It’s an invitation to look closer — and to keep looking.
WORLDART was started in 2004 by Charl Bezuidenhout. The gallery was situated at 54 Church Street in Cape Town for almost two decades till 2024 when it moved to larger premises where it is now located at 68 Long Street. Over the years it has consistently featured on Top 10 lists as one of the best art galleries to visit in Cape Town.