Review | Art Book round-up: From Jane Alexander to Reshada Crouse
For Books24, a round-up of recently published books on South African art.
A wave of new art books has hit the shelves. From self-published memoirs to early career monographs and sweeping continental surveys, South African art is well-represented in book form.
The Distance Within — Nicola Brandt (Steidl, 2025)
Nicola Brandt is a Namibian artist of German and South African descent whose work investigates the history and legacy of German occupation in Namibia. The Distance Within features photographs and video stills made over more than a decade, aiming to deconstruct, as Brandt puts it, “certain established ways of seeing Namibia.”
It’s a gorgeous book — clothbound hardcover with just under 400 pages, almost half of which feature Brandt’s striking images — that’s been edited with great care by Alexandra Dodd. Essays by writers including Sean O’ Toole and Zoë Samudzi feature at the end, as does an interview with the artist by Sven Christian.
Brandt also contributes an introductory essay to the book, which, although formal and impersonal despite the book’s intimate title, does a good job at outlining the artist’s interests and intentions. Here, Brandt takes us through Namibia by way of its landscapes and structures, as well as its people. A group of roaming donkeys, a cluster of unmarked roadside graves, ordinary citizens at work, and endless landscapes with scrubby bushveld, winding roads, and uninterrupted coastal scenes are some of the things Brandt focuses her lens on. There is also archival and research material aplenty, a reminder that German colonialism, National Socialism and apartheid are not mutually exclusive, and that indigenous narratives hold the key to a fuller understanding of Namibian history.
Importantly, Brandt’s images are allowed to exist independently — you need not read the various essays to make sense of the artist’s intentions — though they are brilliantly accompanied. The book’s texts are well-placed. Dotted throughout each section are well-chosen pull-quotes, lifted from the commissioned essays, which all sit towards the end of the book. As far as the essays go, some are narrative-driven and prose-based, transporting you to the sites and contexts with which Brandt is preoccupied. Others are dry and factual — dates, death tallies, and timelines. But both styles of essay are necessary if we are to gain a full understanding of the story of Namibia, however, which is certainly the case in this monumental and significant new book.
Infirmary, Erf 81 (Cape of Good Hope) — Jane Alexander (Stevenson, 2024)
What a joy it is that we still have galleries and artists committed to documenting and celebrating their work outside of commercial exhibition catalogues. Jane Alexander’s Infirmary, Erf 81 (Cape of Good Hope) is a remarkable title that was quietly published in 2024.
Made possible with funds by the Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust’s ‘Extraordinary Award for Sculpture in South Africa’, the book looks at Alexander’s site-specific installation of the same name. Infirmary was first installed in 2020, in a former military storage unit at Erf 81 in Tamboerskloof, Cape Town, for one week. With a comprehensive, contextual introduction by Alexander, the book contains essays by Simon Njami, Premesh Lalu, Svea Josephy, Fabian Saptouw, and John Nankin, all of whom were invited by Alexander to respond to her work, but not specifically to the title installation (save for Njami). As a result, the texts have a varied focus, and paging through Infirmary, Erf 81 (Cape of Good Hope) offers a sweeping view of Alexander’s work over the years. The essays are engaging, and provide great contemporary framing for the artist’s decades-long practice. Josephy’s text, for example. Zeroes in on Alexander’s Butcher Boys sculpture, arguably her best-known work, and looks at what makes an “iconic” work of art.
John Nankin’s essay is perhaps the most intriguing. It follows the socio-political and material history of the building, from its original purpose as an Ammunition Magazine, through to its life as a guerilla gardening site, a haven for youth and animals, a mixed-use art hub, and the site of Alexander’s installation. Nankin himself has a long history with the site, having rented studio space there for 20 years. His essay, equal parts factual and anecdotal, reveals a site that is rich in stories, and makes Alexander’s choice to work there all the more interesting.
To Sharpen Our Senses and Soften Our Touch — Chris Soal (Skira, 2025)
Since graduating from the University of Witwatersrand nearly a decade ago, Johannesburg-born, Cape Town-based artist Chris Soal has been steadily carving out a global career for himself. This early career monograph, then, is right on time.
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Published by Skira, the book’s cover features one of Soal’s signature toothpick works — whirling, resplendent sculptures that look like topographies and creatures all at once. Featuring the evolution of these toothpick works as well as his early bottle-cap works, concrete and rebar sculptures, and his lesser-known woodblock works on eroded sandpaper, the book is less a catalogue than a short, but impressive journey through the flowering career of a young artist making sense of the world through materiality.
A caveat: I might be biased. Among the texts in the book — an introduction by Sean O’ Toole, an interview with the artist by Marta Papini, and an essay by Natasha Becker — is a short story I wrote, largely based on Soal’s early life, work, and his relationship to Johannesburg.
Still, To Sharpen our Senses and Soften our Touch is a remarkable debut publication for a young South African artist and serves as an important moment in his career. It’s a book that’s be equally at home on the coffee table as it is wedged between the South African contemporary art and literature sections of your bookshelf.
Art and the Devil: the life story of an unfashionable painter — Reshada Crouse (2025)
What do good memoirs do? Ideally, we arrive at them for the story of a person and end up engaging the story of a city, an industry, a country. Good memoirs fold history into personal narrative while giving the reader a speculative glance towards the future. In Reshada Crouse’s memoir, Art and the Devil: the life story of an unfashionable painter, we get a narrative that is part memoir and part art criticism. Somewhere in between, there is an interesting view on art-making in South Africa from the height of apartheid into a newly democratic nation.
Over the course of 400 or so pages, Crouse tells the story of her life and work in a frank and conversational style. We hear of her time at the whites-only Pietermaritzburg University of Natal campus in the 1970s, and we hear of her first trip abroad, leading to encounters with the European Masters — Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Children becomes something of a touchstone in the book. There are first loves, first children, heartbreaks, great upheavals and subsequent joys. This is, after all, the stuff of memoir. But each moment is linked to Crouse’s work as an artist, and keenly reflected upon through this lens. As such, Crouse puts forward arguments around feminism, religion, South African art education and more, and this is the real value of Art and the Devil — outside of the strictures of South African art history, we are given a frank and anecdotal account of what it meant to make and engage with art from the 1970s onwards.
There are pitfalls, too. Where Crouse may have reflected more on the role of apartheid-era art education at a tertiary institution and how this shaped the country’s collective approach and response to art, she instead spends a bizarre amount of words trying to call out the hypocrisy of liberal, English-speaking whites who, she’s convinced, treated her differently on account of her Afrikaans accent. Such is the danger of writing the self without an interlocutor — all stories are important, all perspectives urgent. In short, the book would have greatly benefited from a stricter editorial eye.
Still, Art and the Devil is an engaging and insightful book, and unique for its way of blending personal narrative with informed arts writing, making it a book for art-lovers and memoirists alike.
AFRICAN ART: The ARAK Collection — Ashraf Jamal (Skira, 2025)
The ARAK Collection, based in Doha, Qatar is a single private collection of more than 4000 works by artists from Sub-Saharan Africa. AFRICAN ART: The ARAK Collection doesn’t speak to the full collection, but it does feature over 100 works of art from the continent.
With a series of interconnected essays by South African critic Ashraf Jamal, organised according to the themes of Abstraction, Portraiture, and Place, and shorter texts by writers and curators Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti and Neoma Angela Okorie, the book is an entry point to this relatively young, but enormous collection of African art outside of the continent.
Again, I may hold some bias. I helped put the book together and contributed its foreword, but so it goes with independent art writing in South Africa — it’s a small, but vibrant art market, and you end up working on a little bit of everything.
Still, I’m not just here to sing the book’s praises. While it is a monumental publication, the title ‘AFRICAN ART’ is a little vague. A hundred or so artworks by about as many artists is really only a sample of the kind of work coming out of Africa. More specifically, it’s largely the Sub-Saharan part of the continent that these artists are drawn from. So, if it’s a continental survey you’re looking for, keep in mind that it’ll be mediated through the lens of a private collection. But the book is also not simply a vanity publication. Beyond sampling some of the most exciting and enduring artists in the collection, the book is a testament to the projects that are facilitated by ARAK — Jamal has run many an art-writing workshop for ARAK, and the two other authors are both recipients of curatorial and writing residencies with ARAK.
It’s a hefty title, with a good balance of longer critical and prose-based texts, and shorter biographical texts. Open it up on any page and dive in.
