OLIEWENHUIS ART MUSEUM 2025
a solo exhibition by Kilmany-Jo Liversage
9 October - 23 November 2025
Exhibition: PREKARIA: A solo exhibition by Kilmany-Jo Liversage
Dates: 9 October – 23 November 2025
Opening event: 18:00 on Thursday, 9 October 2025
Walkabout event: 11:00 on Friday, 10 October 2025
Venue: Main Building, Oliewenhuis Art Museum, 16 Harry Smith Street, Bloemfontein
PREKARIA: A solo exhibition by Kilmany-Jo Liversage at Oliewenhuis Art Museum
WORLDART is proud to announce that Kilmany-Jo Liversage’s latest solo exhibition, titled PREKARIA, will be hosted by the Oliewenhuis Art Museum 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).
Her first solo exhibition, called Orda in 2006 was held at Blank Projects in Cape Town, and since then she participated in many exhibitions locally and internationally, including the USA, Brussels and Singapore. Recent solo exhibitions were hosted by WORLDART Gallery, Cape Town in 2024 and 2023 and Everard Read, London in 2023. She participated in various local and international art fairs annually since 2013 and has painted walls all over the world, including a large-scale mural at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Liversage’s work is held in various esteemed collections including the Nando’s Collection (displayed globally), the Spier Arts Trust, the Absa Gallery Collection, and the Rand Merchant Bank Corporate Art Collection.
The public is invited to join Oliewenhuis Art Museum for the opening of PREKARIA. The opening will take place at 18:00 on Thursday, 9 October 2025 at Oliewenhuis Art Museum. Everyone is welcome and entrance is free of charge. Refreshments will be served.
A walkabout of the exhibition will be conducted by the artist at 11:00 on Friday, 10 October 2025.
The exhibition can be viewed until Sunday, 23 November 2025. Oliewenhuis Art Museum is located at 16 Harry Smith Street, Bloemfontein and is open to the public from Monday to Friday between 08:00 and 17:00, and on Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays between 09:00 and 16:00.
For more information on Oliewenhuis Art Museum please contact the Museum at 078 968 4300 or oliewen@nasmus.co.za. Stay up to date by following Oliewenhuis Art Museum on Facebook, Instagram and X for all upcoming exhibitions and events.
Oliewenhuis Art Museum is a satellite of the National Museum, Bloemfontein, an agency of the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture.