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. After this, the exhibition will move to WORLDART in Cape Town, where it will be on show from 4-20 December 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