Within South Africa we courier your artwork to your door - the shipping cost will show at the checkout.
When shipping art internationally, two primary options are commonly considered: crated and rolled. Crating involves securely packaging the artwork in a custom-built crate, providing maximum protection against physical damage but often resulting in higher shipping costs due to size and weight.
On the other hand, rolling art involves taking stretched paintings off the frame, carefully wrapping the artwork and placing it in a protective tube. This method is more cost-effective and suitable for flexible pieces.
Choosing between crating and rolling depends on the specific artwork's size, fragility, and budget, as well as the destination's shipping requirements and regulations.
We will be in touch regarding the best options for you.
Virtual hanging of art is an innovative service we offer that allows art enthusiasts and collectors to visualize how artworks will appear in their desired spaces before making a purchase. We digitally place the selected artworks on your walls, in the correct scale to achieve the desired aesthetic. This service not only helps in making informed decisions but also enhances the overall art-buying experience, providing a realistic preview of the final result and ensuring that the chosen artworks harmonize with the surrounding decor. Please contact us to make use of this service!
The abrasions, scratches, and scraped passages of Fragmenta act as deliberate wounds, evoking the violence of historical rupture: colonisation, displacement, censorship, and cultural erasure. These marks are not concealed; they are foregrounded, insisting that damage itself becomes part of the visual language. Dripping paint references both decay and continuity—time in motion—where pigment behaves like gravity-bound memory, refusing containment or order.
Stephen Symons
Stephen Symons
Stephen Symons was born in 1966 in Cape Town, South Africa, where he currently lives and works. Alongside his visual art practice, he runs a graphic design studio and works as a historian 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 from the Cape Peninsula
University of Technology. He has had two solo exhibitions, titled Nutria, related to his PhD research at the Castle of the Cape of Good Hope (2017), and at the University of Pretoria (2018) and is an award- winning author of poetry and short fiction.
Symons’s artistic practice engages the tradition of portraiture as a layered and contested archive rather than a fixed representation of identity. His works challenge the notion of the portrait as a complete and permanent record, instead presenting the face as something constructed through processes of accumulation, erasure, and revision.
The heavily textured surfaces of his works function as visual palimpsests, built up and scraped back to reveal traces of earlier layers. This process reflects his interest in the way history is continually rewritten, with the past remaining present through fragments and residues. By referencing classical portrait conventions while simultaneously disrupting them, Symons questions ideas of visibility, memory, and who is remembered.
Through fragmentation and material tension, his work reflects the complexity of identity and historical truth, inviting the viewer to consider the portrait not as a fixed image, but as an evolving record shaped over time.
Stephen Symons is represented by The Artists Gallery in Cape Town.