Norval Foundation is excited to announce the exhibition opening of Irma Stern: Looking closer to home, the second exhibition in a four-part series dedicated to the life and work of celebrated South African
artist Irma Stern (1894 – 1966), on 2 October 2026.
Stern’s market has only gained momentum in recent years: in October 2025, her 1946 portrait Malay (Black Headdress) sold for R21.7 million at Strauss & Co; the second-highest price ever achieved for her work at auction, and a record for any Stern portrait of a female sitter sold in Africa. Children Reading the Koran achieved R22.3 million in 2023, and her work also featured in the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.
Now firmly established as one of South Africa’s foremost modernists, Stern’s continuing rise offers timely point of entry for media to revisit and more closely understand an artist whose critical reputation is still actively being written.
Looking closer to home is the second of four landmark Irma Stern exhibitions tracing her extraordinary life, journeys and artistic legacy as one of South Africa’s most celebrated modernists. The exhibition formspart of a multi-year collaboration between the Norval Foundation, the Irma Stern Trust and Nedbank.
“Looking closer to home brings together a body of work that has never been shown in this way before. For the first time, paintings Stern made in KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and Eswatini are presented alongside related charcoal drawings and sculptures drawn directly from her archive. These are works that reveal the depth of her engagement with the South African landscape and its people at a formative moment in her career. Through this partnership with the Norval Foundation, The Irma Stern Trust, and Nedbank, we are able to ensure that Stern’s legacy is not only preserved but actively shared with new audiences, which is exactly what she would have wanted.” Caroline Greyling, Norval Foundation Museum Director
Norval Foundation, Irma Stern,
The Irma Stern Trust holds the artist’s estate and, until 2025, worked with the University of Cape Town to administer the Irma Stern Museum at The Firs, the artist’s former home and studio in Rosebank. Following the museum’s temporary closure for refurbishment last year and the relocation of its collection to secure archival storage, this partnership with Norval Foundation has become an important vehicle through which Stern’s legacy can be maintained and expended, ensuring her work can continue to reach exhibition audiences.
Says Kathy Wheeler, curator of the Irma Stern Trust Collection, ‘we’re very excited to bring these works to an audience outside the walls of the Irma Stern Museum, in partnership with the Norval Foundation. Many of them have never been exhibited before and offer a unique insight into a quite neglected but very important part of her history and development as a significant modernist artist.
Born in 1894 in Schweizer-Reneke, South Africa, to German-Jewish parents, Stern spent her early years moving between South Africa and Germany before settling there as a young woman to pursue her artistic training. Norval Foundation’s previous exhibition, The Berlin Years, chronicled Stern’s development as a student and her pivotal meeting with Max Pechstein and others in the avant-garde German Expressionist group. Interspersed with journeys back to South Africa, Stern’s life offered a double perspective on both Europe and Africa, unlike that of her German contemporaries.
Fingo Woman
By the 1930s, the rise of anti-Semitism made it difficult for Stern to return to Germany, and her focus shifted to travelling and painting in rural South Africa; work that would go on to define her reputation, despite a cool critical reception when it was first shown in Cape Town. At the outbreak of World War II, she travelled even further afield in Africa to paint in the Congo and later Zanzibar – the subjects of the two exhibitions to follow in 2027.
Looking closer to home will open to the public on 2 October 2026, on the 132nd anniversary of Stern’s birth, and will run until January 2027.
WHAT: Irma Stern – Looking Closer to Home
WHERE: Norval Foundation, 4 Steenberg Rd, Tokai, Cape Town 7945
WHEN: 2 October 2026 until January 2027
INFO: T 087 654 5900 | E info@norvalfoundation.org | VISIT | Instagram @norvalfoundation | Facebook NorvalFoundation | LinkedIn NorvalFoundation | see also Arts Round Up: Curator Andrew Lamprecht – Irma Stern’s Arab Priest Returns to IZIKO SANG
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