Norval Foundation, situated in the Tokai region of Cape Town, is a haven for both South African and African artwork. The gallery, founded in 2018, aims to nurture understanding and appreciation of African art. It strives to position African artists within the global art historical canon, fostering awareness and elevating the discourse around their contributions. Here’s everything happening at Norval this month.

Upcoming Events at Norval Foundation

Irma Stern Walkabout

Attendees join experienced curator Karel Nel in a walkabout of Irma Stern: Looking Closer to Home, learning more about the pioneering artist, her expressive and modernist style, her journeys through South Africa, and what inspired some of her most beloved works.

Participants get a first look at Norval Foundation’s latest exhibition in a series of showcases of Stern’s work. A valid Day Pass or Norval Foundation Membership is required to attend.

When: Saturday & Sunday, 3 & 4 October 2026 | From 11am

Norval Foundation Holiday Art Club

Norval Foundation runs its school holiday Art Club across six themed sessions, guiding children aged 7 to 12 through a different medium and inspiration each day, drawn from the gallery’s collection and grounds. Each session is led by experienced art educators, introducing techniques spanning painting, drawing, sculpture and mixed media.

The programme opens with a watercolour and wax workshop inspired by the sculpture garden’s resident chameleons, followed by an outdoor acrylic painting session set among the garden’s indigenous fynbos and wetland habitat. Later sessions include fabric painting inspired by the Strelitzia flower, a wire and stocking sculpture workshop drawing on Yinka Shonibare’s Wind Sculpture, a stained-glass-style spring workshop, and a closing session inspired by the garden’s resident Helmeted Guineafowl.

Each workshop encourages self-expression through hands-on activity rather than a fixed, instructor-led outcome, with children encouraged to bring their own interpretation to the day’s technique and theme.

Cost: R300 – R320 per child, per workshop. Booking available on Webtickets.
When: 28 September – 2 October 2026 | Most workshops 10am – 12.30pm | Wire & Stocking Sculpture Workshop (30 Sept) 2pm – 4.30pm

Garden Day

Enjoy a relaxed day in the sun in Norval Foundation’s iconic Sculpture Garden, as the museum opens its doors for Garden Day. Each ticket includes access to both the Sculpture Garden and the museum, so guests can explore the garden’s beauty and the eye-opening exhibitions inside.

A wide range of entertaining activities runs throughout the day, including flower crown workshops, face painting, a balloon artist, live music, food trucks, picnics, and creative workshops for kids. The main attraction is undoubtedly a live performance from Jungle Theatre, a beloved local theatre company that tells indigenous stories through music, dance, and puppetry. Adults can try three acclaimed Simonsig wines with a special, complimentary tasting experience.

Everyone is encouraged to bring a picnic blanket, soak up the spring atmosphere, and enjoy a day of relaxation, creativity, and connection in the Norval Foundation’s lush gardens.

Cost: R250 per person. Book now via Webtickets.
When: Sunday, 18 October 2026 | 10am – 4pm

Santa Shoebox Project

Norval Foundation is inviting individuals, families, businesses, schools, and communities across the city to make meaningful Christmas gifts for children in need. Together, people from around the country get eight new items, ranging from toys and hygiene products to clothing and sweets, to give to selected beneficiary children. Norval Foundation is a registered drop-off point for the project; interested parties can learn more via the website.

When: 1 October – 6 November 2026 | 10am – 4.30pm

Private guided tours

Guests can enjoy a personalised experience led by one of Norval’s in-house guides to gain a deeper understanding of the artworks, artists, and stories shaping their bold exhibitions. Each tour is a 45-60-minute deep dive into the exhibitions listed above, where up to 10 adults can engage more closely with the art on display and the museum itself.

Book via email.

Current Exhibitions at Norval Foundation

Norval Foundation has 9 gallery spaces available for exhibitions, as well as the atrium space, which hosts large-scale display pieces. Here are the current exhibitions on display at Norval Foundation.

Irma Stern: Looking Closer to Home

The Norval Foundation is proud to announce the second exhibition in a landmark series of showcases tracing the extraordinary life, journeys, and artistic legacy of one of South Africa’s most celebrated modernists, Irma Stern. Drawing on material from her extensive archive and Collection, this exhibition continues a multi-year collaboration between the Norval Foundation, the Irma Stern Trust and Nedbank.

Looking Closer to Home follows Stern’s work after leaving Germany during the rise of anti-Semitism. This new exhibition highlights paintings Stern made while travelling between KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and Eswatini, alongside related charcoal drawings and sculptures.

This partnership continues the pivotal preservation of Stern’s legacy, following the closure of the Irma Stern Museum at The Firs in 2025, the historic home where Stern lived and worked for almost four decades. This makes these Norval Foundation exhibitions important homes for presenting and protecting works from one of the country’s most iconic painters.

When: 2 October 2026 – 10 January 2027
Where: Norval Foundation, 4 Steenberg Rd, Tokai, Cape Town

Wild Life by Brett Murray

Norval Foundation presents Brett Murray: Wild Life, a major solo exhibition by one of South Africa’s most acclaimed artists. Curated by Karel Nel, the exhibition brings together more than eighty sculptures spanning four decades of Murray’s celebrated and sometimes controversial career. 

Artist Brett Murray has long been recognised for his sharp wit and fearless social commentary. In Wild Life, he uses the animal world as a mirror for our own – blending humour, satire and empathy to explore human behaviour.

The exhibition includes a fascinating assortment of creatures: primates, elephants, bulls, pigs and imagined hybrids. Each sculpture captures the contradictions of modern life – the comic, the tragic and the deeply human. Behind the polished bronze and marble surfaces lies a sharp observation of society’s foibles.

When: Until 22 November 2026
Where: Norval Foundation, 4 Steenberg Rd, Tokai, Cape Town

All About Brett Murray’s Wild Life Exhibition

Unsteady Realms by Kate Gottgens

Born in Durban, Gottgens graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 1987, a famed institution with alums including Breyten Breytenbach, Lungiswa Gqunta, and Zapiro. In 2014, she was picked by Thames & Hudson as the only South African in their list of the ‘100 Painters of Tomorrow’. She followed that up in 2019 by receiving the Ampersand Fellowship Award, which earned her a residency in New York City.

Gottgens’ style, most often in oil on canvas, draws on found imagery, personal photos, and fragments of everyday life. Her images often evoke unstable dreams and blurry imagination, distorting reality like a fading photograph. Rather than offering a clear answer, her art asks the viewer to reflect on the imagery and fill in the gaps, making uncertainty feel as unsettling as it is tender.

Unsteady Realms invites audiences to experience the breadth of a significant South African artist’s work, engaging with warped memory and embracing ambiguity both within and outside of the exhibition. The featured paintings include recent additions like 2026’s Ferrying Souls and older works like 2015’s Milk Teeth, alongside highlights from the past few years including Hexing the Air, Sensing the Trap, and Her Fine Blades.

When: From 15 September 2026

Githan Coopoo: Tears Now But Heaven Tomorrow

This exhibition honours the legacy of South African artist Githan Coopoo (1994–2025), whose singular voice redefined the possibilities of clay in contemporary art.

A self-taught sculptor, Coopoo transformed clay into a medium of adornment, critique, and storytelling. His innovative practice blurred the boundaries between craft and fine art, shaping fragile material into both intimate jewellery and commanding sculptural forms. His work carried tenderness, humour, and defiance, revealing the strength in vulnerability and the beauty in fragility.

Drawing inspiration from mythology, ancient civilisations, and his queer, South African and diasporic heritage, Coopoo created works that resonated with both personal and universal meaning. Playful yet profound, his sculptures invite us to consider how bodies and spaces hold memory, desire, and history, while questioning value, permanence, and identity.

When: Until 4 October 2026
Where: The Atrium, Norval Foundation, 4 Steenberg Rd, Tokai, Cape Town

All About Githan Coopoo’s Tears Now But Heaven Tomorrow Exhibition

Explore Norval Foundation’s Sculpture Garden

The Sculpture Garden at the Norval Foundation features three-dimensional installations by artists from South Africa and the rest of Africa. The unique site, split by a protected Cape lowland freshwater wetland and surrounded by the natural beauty of the Western Cape, features flora indigenous to the area. The placement of artwork takes the site into account, using the garden’s contours to hide and reveal the work, creating an experience of discovery for the viewer.

The building has been designed so that the western side opens onto the Sculpture Garden at multiple points, allowing visitors to access the Sculpture Garden from the galleries and creating connections between exhibitions taking place both inside and outside. The exhibition programme in the Sculpture Garden aims to represent a plurality of practices currently taking place in the region, including artists working with the figure, narrative and mythology, abstraction and post-minimalism, and craft.

The Norval Foundation Learning Centre

Norval Foundation’s Learning Centre is an investment in the South African youth, aiming to educate young people through art. The Centre fosters the development of creative thinking, interpretation, and problem-solving skills, which, in turn, enable learners to make better life decisions. The Centre is open to all, and more information can be found on the website.

Primary School Learners

Norval Foundations offers children the chance to engage with art while developing and supporting creativity and problem-solving skills. The objective is to expose children to art, a museum environment and world-class curated art exhibitions.

The educational tour includes a museum tour, a Sculpture Garden tour, exploring the world of sculpture art and an art history lesson and art-making activity, which the children then take home. The tour also integrates the CAPS curriculum into by teaching skills such as comprehension, visual literacy, creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving.

The cost of the Educational Tour is R60 per child, with accompanying teachers free. For an additional R90 per person, each child will receive a copy of the Making Art History book, the first children’s book published about African Art.

High School and Tertiary Student Tours

A guided tour at Norval Foundation offers opportunities for your students to experience and interact with art first-hand. Led by the exhibition curators and museum-trained educators, the tours engage young people in topical and lively discussions to further their understanding of art, encourage critical thinking, and deepen their knowledge. Tours are customised to suit various educational levels and curricula, and have been developed for grades 9 -12, as well as tertiary education levels.

The tour includes a museum tour of all of the exhibitions on show, or a dedicated tour of one exhibition in particular. Students also experience a Sculpture Garden tour, discussions and interactions with art curators, and guidance on the different careers that exist within the art industry, and the educational routes available.

The tour costs R60 per student with an accompanying teacher’s fee. The Norval Foundation also hosts Youth Access Days, where young people between the ages of 18 and 24 enter the museum for free.

Bookings for these tours can be done through email.

Hire the Norval Foundation

The Norval Foundation offers a variety of event spaces, each with its own unique appeal. The Sculpture Garden provides an outdoor setting perfect for garden parties or receptions, surrounded by large-scale sculptures and beautiful landscapes. The Atrium is a bright, open indoor space suitable for larger gatherings, product launches, or exhibitions. The nine state-of-the-art galleries offer flexible spaces for art exhibitions, private events, or corporate functions. Lastly, the library provides a more intimate setting for smaller, quieter events like book launches or private meetings. These diverse venues cater to a wide range of events and can be tailored to suit different needs.

Enquire about booking the Norval Foundation for a function via email.

How to Visit Norval Foundation

Norval Foundation offers an annual, affordable membership for single, double and group tickets with special perks such as invitations to exhibition openings and special discounts on guided tours. All pensioners pay half price every Thursday, and African Nationals may need to present their passports to access the special entry fee. See more info here.

Cost: Day Pass – R220pp for African Nationals | R330pp for Internationals | R110pp for young adults aged 18 to 24 years | Kids under 18 enter free. Book via Webtickets

When: 10am to 5pm (Wed to Sat) | 10am to 4pm (Sun) | Closed on Mon & Tues
Where: Norval Foundation, 4 Steenberg Road, Tokai

Website: norvalfoundation.org
Email: [email protected]
Tel: 087 654 5900
Instagram: @norvalfoundation
Facebook: @NorvalFoundation

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