10 October - 21 November 2026

Untitled is pleased to present 'Fee Fi Fo Fum', Colijn Strydom's third solo exhibition with Untitled.

"Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman", so goes the ancient rhyme.

Humour and horror in equal measure.

Playfulness overshadowed by the uncanny.

"Fee-fi-fo-fum," as kids jump and puff and growl,

mimicking the stomps of ‘Jack & the Beanstalk’’s giant.

Colijn Strydom's solo exhibition, 'Fee Fi Fo Fum', is inspired by the playground game of the same name that has its roots in ancient fairy tales. These tales are traceable to centuries earlier in Shakespeare's 'King Lear '. 'Fie, foh, and fum', exclaims the character Edgar, feigning madness in Act Three, Scene Four.^[1]

Much like the tales, Strydom’s 'Fee Fi Fo Fum' foregrounds the odd, the sensorial and the vivid.

The exhibition blends shifting viewpoints between dream worlds, historical worlds and present reality through drawings, paintings and ceramics. 

His process involved a sustained focus on the language of drawing, its primacy and immediacy; how it allows for quick forms of thinking and mark-making that feel less weighted. He is attentive to material too, with paper as a starting point and linen, wood panels and clay as surfaces that give way to rethinking old mediums that carry centuries of art-historical weight.

For Strydom, weight is physical, but it is also psychological and psychic. It is a reminder of the thin line that exists between make-believe and what is believed to be real. The show, then, is built on primaeval hallucinatory dreams, fragments of memories, specific episodes from his parents' lives, melded together as fiction and document. Within an intimate scope, 'Fee Fi Fo Fum’ is a biography of his parents' imagined dream worlds, while in a larger sense it is an exploration of myth, memory and how one can handle historical record. 

Drawing on imagery from the Hellenic world, combined with the theatrical language of the Baroque, Strydom takes from each small components that make up his broader template. These touchstones, rooted in art history, are disrupted by the act of being pulled out of their original context - now rendered in a distinctive style that is hypercontemporary, animated and playful. 

This sense of tongue-in-cheek disruption is also evident in Strydom’s approach to colour. While older works were filled with colour, here he strips back with a limited palette.  Using mostly pink, blue, yellow, black and white, he frontlines the mark as a focal point while also embracing white space. For him, the blank white space - often feared as absence by many - carries just as much material weight as the figures and forms drawn on it.

Within his frame of symbolic storytelling, he returns to a set of recurring motifs. The horse appears often, taking from his father's love of horses and their symbolic association with strength and grace. Jellyfish recur too, a nod to his mother's love of the ocean. Fragmented torsos echoed in ancient Greek sculpture appear alongside heads, arms, legs, tubes, blocks, bananas and apples - lighthearted gestures that punctuate his thinking of the everyday alongside the extraordinary.

Just as he is constantly going backwards and forwards in time (through memory and rememory), in material and medium, he moves similarly between paintings. The largest painting in the show is titled Flyday, a touching reference to a phrase his father used to say to him every Friday (Happy Flyday). The painting functions like a ‘storage space’ containing elements that find their way to the rest of the works. A grid here, a falling figure there, or a series of dots will appear elsewhere - drawing from the method of collage and assemblage.

Mostly, these motifs converge around the human figure. There are figures everywhere: they fall, recline, leap and hide their faces in exasperation. These are figures from history, dreams, archival images and personal photographs. While he is drawing on memory and art historical references, he is also using images of strangers and friends as source material; some come from heritage portals, including a large box of family photographs left behind by a close friend before he left the country. For Strydom, painting a picture of a picture feels truer than life painting. 

In this sense, 'Fee Fi Fo Fum' traces overlapping and interconnected stories, alongside unrelated narratives that seamlessly fall into each other, while also remaining jagged. By referencing both fact and fiction, the exhibition meditates on where symbols remain. Whether as gestures with little force or as forceful expressions that pull us closer towards the real.