I Seek Your Softness: Tender Explorations of Paint, featuring Kay-Leigh Fisher, Joëlle Joubert, Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne and Dineo Ponde, in an exhibition curated by Simona Stone, opens at THK Gallery on Thursday, 31 July from 6–8pm.
The exhibition speaks to the intimacy, connection, and vulnerability required in order to experience a transfer of energy — of love, of care, of presence, of body warmth. It is the active energy generated by the very notion of being alive. It is shared across bodies by their closeness, their company, their vulnerability, their care.
I Seek Your Softness responds to a global moment which leaves us yearning for spaces and people who offer softness. The exhibition rejects hostility, and does so gently. It focuses on our reaching for less complex comforts in a time of despair, as we simultaneously question our integrity. Our scale. Our power. Where our skin begins and ends. We hunker into hands woven together, ready to hold us. Four painters converge in this space to consider the scales of tenderness both possible and necessary in such a time.
Kay-Leigh Fisher, Joëlle Joubert, Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne, and Dineo Ponde paint to form material surfaces that seek—and at times offer—comfort, embodying a shared curiosity that is both tender and deliberate.
Simona Stone is a curator, writer, and interdisciplinary creative based in Cape Town. Her curatorial practice is driven by a deep fascination with the complex relationships between bodies, materiality, scale, memory, and space.
Her work centres on processes of languaging—visual, textual, and embodied—as a multi-layered, feminist method for grappling with the interior and exterior landscapes that shape our existence. Through an ongoing enquiry into the ‘solidity’ of trusted or supposedly concrete ideas, Simona seeks to peel back layers in search of new opportunities for connection and expression. Her approach draws from both visual art and literature, weaving them into a cohesive, exploratory practice
Artist Abdus Salaam is currently positioned between two significant solo institutional exhibitions. He has just concluded Tesoro / Treasure, his debut solo exhibition in Italy, presented in the 16th-century Marchi Chapel following his residency at Studio Maretti. The exhibition was organised by the Medici Foundation and the Municipality of Pietrasanta in collaboration with Galleria Giovanni Bonelli.
Abdus Salaam, Rivulets, 2024
Returning to South Africa, Salaam is featured in The One and the Many, a landmark exhibition opening at Javett-UP in Pretoria. This ambitious show brings contemporary artists into dialogue with historic South African collections, exploring the relationship between the individual and the collective. Salaam’s video work, Rivulets (2024), appears in the section titled Colossal Time, where he considers water as a spiritual and metaphysical force.
Multiple reasons to seek out I Seek Your Softness: Tender Explorations of Paint at THK Gallery.
WHAT: I Seek Your Softness: Tender Explorations of Paint
WHERE: THK Cape Town, 52 Waterkant Street, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: Opening 31 July 2025 | Gallery hours Tues – Fri 10:00 – 18:00 Sat 10:00 – 14:00
INFO: T +27(0)76 367 6387 | E office@thkgallery.com | VISIT LEAD PHOTO: Dineo Ponde, I bend, I break for you my love, 2025
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