Stephen Symons Explores the Layers of Memory and Identity in Textura Animae

New solo exhibition opens 4 September 2026 at 33BREE, Cape Town.

Cape Town, South Africa – This September, Cape Town artist, historian and award-winning writer Stephen Symons presents Textura Animae: The Texture of the Soul, a new solo exhibition opening on 3 September 2026 at 33BREE, the sister gallery of The Artists Gallery in Cape Town.

At once visually seductive and deeply contemplative, Textura Animae explores portraiture beyond physical likeness. Rather than representing specific individuals, Symons uses the human face as a site to investigate memory, identity, history, and the traces of lived experience.

Created entirely through a sophisticated digital process, the works combine layered photographs, scanned materials, found textures, fragments of fabric, weathered surfaces, paint marks and digital brushwork. Images are built, obscured and rebuilt, sometimes through more than 100 individual layers, creating surfaces that appear to crack, peel, stain and dissolve.

The result occupies an intriguing space between painting and photography, the ancient and the contemporary, memory and imagination. Faces emerge from richly worked surfaces before seemingly disappearing into them again. The portrait becomes less an image of a person than an artefact carrying evidence of what has come before.

“Memory is rarely pristine, and identity is never singular. We carry layers of history, culture, loss, resilience and transformation within us. In these works, the face becomes a landscape, and the portrait becomes an artefact,” says Symons.

Drawing inspiration from mythology, archaeology, African histories and classical narratives, Symons approaches his portraits as visual palimpsests — much like ancient manuscripts or walls that retain traces of earlier inscriptions even after they have been overwritten.

This relationship with history is particularly significant within Symons’s wider practice. Born in Cape Town in 1966, he is not only a visual artist but also a historian, graphic designer and author. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Pretoria, a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, and a National Higher Diploma in Graphic Design. An award-winning author of poetry and short fiction, he recently received the 2026 Olive Schreiner Prize for Poetry.

These different disciplines converge in Textura Animae. His historian’s fascination with traces of the past, the writer’s sensitivity to narrative and the visual artist’s engagement with surface and composition come together in works that question how human lives  and histories are remembered.

Ultimately, the exhibition proposes that a human life resembles an ancient manuscript: written, erased and rewritten, yet never entirely stripped of what came before. The textures within Symons’s portraits become the textures of history itself, personal, collective and enduring.

Textura Animae – The Texture of the Soul
Solo Exhibition by Stephen Symons
4 – 26 September 2026
33 Bree Street (entrance Waterkant Street)
Admission free