The still life has long been dismissed as the quietest of genres – fruit, flowers, the occasional dead pheasant. Strauss & Co’s programme at this year’s Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees, running until 11 October, makes the case that it was never quiet at all.
At Oude Leeskamer, Anything but Static gathers more than 60 works from the Caro Wiese, Kilbourn, and Sanlam collections, tracing the genre from Maggie Laubser’s The Blue Jug (1924) through Irma Stern and Frans Oerder to Pieter Hugo and Penny Siopis. Curator Jo Voysey argues that over the past 25 years, still life has moved beyond arranged objects into “dynamic, interactive, and conceptual works”, with artists increasingly inserting themselves into the frame.
The exhibition sits alongside a show of art jewellery by 15 South African art jewellers, staged with Stellenbosch University’s Creative Jewellery and Metal Design Division and timed to an online auction running 23 September to 14 October. Jill Van Dugteren, who heads the Decorative Arts and Design Department at Strauss & Co, draws the distinction sharply: “Where painting fixes a moment, jewellery mobilises it.” The body may be absent from a still life, she notes, but it is essential to animating jewellery.
Stellenbosch Town Hall takes the commercial and conversational side of the programme. The fifth annual benefit auction takes place on 10 October, aimed at drawing new collectors into a market that can feel forbidding. Lizelle Kilbourn and Bina Genovese share their impressions from the Venice Biennale 2026 on 5 October, while Frank Kilbourn and EasyEquities’ Carel Nolte join a panel discussion on the value and legacy of collecting on 6 October.
The festival’s more inventive moments come late in the week. On 9 October, painter Gabrielle Kruger and dancers from Cape Ballet Africa stage an immersive performance at Oude Leeskamer in which sight, sound, taste and memory converge – still life, finally, with a pulse.
Tickets are available at Quicket.
