Selwyn Steyn: Static Land Stills
Tomorrows/Today TT5
Titled STATIC LAND STILLS, Steyn’s project for Tomorrows/Today 2026 brings together a new body of paintings that engage with the urban landscape of Johannesburg and the wider Gauteng region. Rendered in dust-laden tones of muted orange, pale brown, and grey, the city appears immediately recognisable yet subtly estranged: austere, stripped of spectacle or consolation. Roads, bridges, municipal buildings, quarries, peripheral fields, and dense urban grids recur across the small-format paintings, which are installed in a dense grid built in cardboard - the same material architects use to construct maquettes. Here, however, the structure evokes the logic of a surveillance control room.
Selwyn Steyn • Studies from the In-between
This body of work is about Gauteng, and perception and atmosphere and the built environment and a bunch of other things as well.
The light in Gauteng is of a particular quality. Something between gold (like that which is extracted) and yellow (like the extraction’s detritus). Something between aurum and uranium. Treasure and toxicity. This is particularly so of the winter light, which is a potpourri of dust and carbon and altitude and veld and gold.