The award winners of the Sasol New Signatures competition for 2025 were announced on Wed, Sep 3, 2025 – and with it comes a brilliant exhibition showcasing their works and those of the other 106 finalists at Pretoria Art Museum. As one of South Africa's most prestigious art competitions for emerging artists, the only criteria for those submitting is that they have not yet hosted a solo exhibition. It makes the exhibition particularly exciting as you have sculptural works showing alongside intricate drawings and prints, video art, paintings, textiles, and many more works that don't fit neatly into any one medium.
Juandré van Eck from Gqeberha was crowned 2025's overall winner for his interactive ceramic piece Cycles of the mind. Consisting of two chambers through which water passes from one to the other, Cycles of the mind is one of many pieces that chairperson of the Sasol New Signatures visual arts competition, Pfunzo Sidogi, says "demand to be experienced beyond purely visual and cognitive dimensions." We certainly found this to be the case, and the interactivity of many of the works on display makes a visit in person well worth it.
Then Thabo Treasure Mofokeng's Still Standing took home the runner-up prize and is one of many exceptional paintings on display at Pretoria Art Museum. Here, the variety of styles on display, from vivid realism to contorted abstractions, shows how South Africa's art scene is increasingly a place of experimentation, where no one approach to representation is privileged over others.
Also on display are the five merit winners: Tammy Lee Baikie, Rebecca Louise (Beck) Glass, Snelihle Asanda Maphumulo, Vian Mervyn Roos, and Sarah Volker. For more on their works, as well as Juandré van Eck and Thabo Treasure Mofokeng's, read our introduction to the 2025 winners.
If 106 artworks weren't already enough of a reason to plan a visit, 2024 Sasol New Signatures winner, Miné Kleynhans, hosts her solo Augury After Autogogues alongside the Sasol New Signatures 2025 exhibition. In this exhibition, she presents us with various tools of divination, each of which can be used to gain insights and reflect on the world, people around us, and ourselves. Deftly balancing sincerity and play, Kleynhans' works demand to be seen and engaged with in person.
Both the group showcase and Kleynhans' solo are showing at the Pretoria Art Museum until Sun, Nov 2, 2025.
