IS THIS THE REAL LIFE?

a solo exhibition by Norman O’Flynn

6 - 27 November 2025

Sweet dreams baby | Acrylic paint on plexiglass | 150cm x 120cm.

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We are pleased to announce Norman O’Flynn’s 2025 solo exhibition with WORLDART which will open on 6 November in Cape Town.

In Is this the real life? Norman O’Flynn transforms interiors into charged stages where culture, history and memory collide. Each reverse-glass painting documents the now – a moment oversaturated with images, icons and contradictions.

The works assemble fragments of mass culture and art history into domestic scenes that feel at once familiar and unreal. Spam and Tweety Bird, Picasso and Murakami, Stephen King and Michael Jackson all share the same rooms. They do not belong together, yet here they coexist, much as they do in our digital feeds and our daily lives.

O’Flynn’s interior paintings also hold the tension between good and evil, the comic and the tragic, the sacred and the absurd. A Warhol portrait of Michael Jackson presides over a room where a toy figure hides in grief. A Guernica figure screams across a waiting room lined with cartoonish serpent chairs. A dollar sign hangs beside an astronaut’s helmet, collapsing the gap between money and the cosmos.

The question that gives the exhibition its title hovers throughout; Is this the real life? These paintings mirror the disorientation of our time – bright, anxious, layered, and unstable – where comfort and collapse coexist, and reality itself feels both hyper-visible and out of reach.

The exhibition will run till 27 November 2025.

 NORMAN O’FLYNN (b. 1971) lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

He is a painter and sculptor and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, residencies and workshops across the globe.

His love for an interdisciplinary approach and cross-cultural collaboration add extra pep to his distinct visual language, a vocabulary of immediately and globally recognisable imagery.

Besides traditional exhibitions in Miami, London and Munich, O’Flynn also explored blockchain technology at an early stage of its development and in April 2021 successfully sold his first NFT. Painting and sculpture remain a priority and areas that he excels in.

“O’Flynn knows Pop to be an irresistible lure, he also knows it to be the defining symptom of human error. By trafficking inside of it, he exposes its folly and opens up its strengths. The initial image grabs you and pulls you in. Once inside, however, we are snagged in ‘unfuckery,’ words, signs, symbols that expose Pop’s corrosive lure.“ - Ashraf Jamal, arts writer and author

Education:

·       1988-1992 BA Fine Arts, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Special honours & awards:

·       2017,-18,-19 Pietra Santa Sculpture Residency, Italy

·       2016 IICD Residency, Nigeria

·       2009 Triangle Artists’ Workshop, Beirut

·       2007 ABSA L’Atelier finalist, Johannesburg

·       2006 Pro-Helvetia Fellowship and residency at Altes Spital, Solothurn (Switzerland)

·       2004 Thapong International Artists’ Residency, Gaborone (Botswana)

·       2005 ABSA L’Atelier finalist, Johannesburg

·       2004 Brett Kebble Art Awards national finalist

·       2004 ABSA L’Atelier top 100, Johannesburg

·       2003 Insaka International Artists’ Residency, Rockstone Studios, Lusaka (Zambia)

·       1992 Irma Stern Award for Excellence in Printmaking, University of Cape Town (South Africa)

Solo exhibitions:

·       2025 Is this the real life? WORLDART, Cape Town

·       2025 HABITAT, Everard Read, Franschoek

·       2023 After the stampede, WORLDART, Cape Town

·       2022 Rules for rebels, WORLDART, Cape Town

·       2021 Always and always, WORLDART, Cape Town

·       2020 All the Rage, WORLDART, Cape Town

·       2019 Cool and Composed, WORLDART, Cape Town

·       2018 Timekeeper, Art Supermarket Asia, Hong Kong

·       2018 GNOMON. WORLDART, Cape Town

·       2017 Better & Better. WORLDART, Cape Town

·       2016 The good, the bad and the BOOM! WORLDART, Cape Town

·       2015 BANG BANG BOOM. Diedericks Faber. Johannesburg / Cape Town

·       2012 Guardians. WORLDART, Cape Town

·       2010 Deep Down we all want to rob a bank. Erdmann Contemporary, Cape Town

·       2009 The World Needs Me. Erdmann Contemporary, Cape Town

·       2007 Never Too Late To Be A Man, Bell Roberts Contemporary, Cape Town

·       2005 The Bull and Other Stories, Bell Roberts Contemporary, Cape Town

·       2005 Currency, AVA (Association for Visual Art), Cape Town

·       2004 Behind The Tent, Thapong, Gaborone, Botswana

Art Fairs:

·       2025, -24, -23, -22, -20, -19, -18, -17, -16 Investec Cape Town International Art Fair

·       2025, -24, -23 RMB Latitudes Art Fair

·       2019 Sydney Contemporary, Sydney

·       2023, -22, -21, -19, -18, -17 Turbine Art Fair, represented by WORLDART

·       2018 Stroke International Art Fair, Munich

·       2018, -12, -11 FNB Johannesburg Art Fair, Johannesburg

·       2017 SCOPE Miami, Miami

·       2016, -17 Moniker Art Fair, London

Collections:

·       Deutsche Bank

·       Rand Merchant Bank

·       Nando’s Contemporary Art (UK/Australia/South Africa)

·       Hollard Insurance

·       Luciano Benetton

·       MTN

·       University of Cape Town

·       MAP South Africa

·       Sanlam

·       Spier

For more information, contact Charl Bezuidenhout at info@worldart.co.za or on +27 (0)21 423 3075 or visit www.worldart.co.za