A powerful artwork exploring what young South Africans inherit from the past earns Jozi artist Sphumelele Zondi a career-changing opportunity.
Pretoria, South Africa (14 September 2026) – Sphumelele Zondi decided that she would take a chance on entering one of South Africa’s best-known visual arts competitions for the first time this year.
The 26-year-old has since been named the overall winner of the 2026 Sasol New Signatures Visual Arts Competition for her mixed-media work, The laundry of a nation.
Taking top honours, Zondi received R100,000 and the opportunity to present a solo exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum in 2027.
Born in KwaZulu-Natal and now based in Joburg, Zondi works mainly in sculpture and mixed media. Her art explores memory, inherited narratives and the relationship between past and present, drawing on personal and collective histories, resilience, and the emotional traces embedded in everyday materials.
Her winning piece looks at the emotional and social inheritance carried by young South Africans, using clothing and the everyday act of laundry to unpack bigger ideas.
In many South African homes, clothes are passed between siblings and neighbours, worn to schools and churches, and tied to work, class, religion, survival and economic circumstances.
They become a record of the lives and histories they have moved through, in Zondi’s work.
“This was my first time entering the competition,” said Zondi. “What prompted me to enter Sasol New Signatures was the incredible opportunities and exposure it provides to young emerging artists. I first became aware of the competition during my university years, and this year I felt ready to take that step and put my work forward. The competition holds such great significance in the South African art space and an important platform where my work could be seen and engaged with.”
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One Small Granny Square Turned Into 50 Colourful Blankets for Charities!What a competitive year to take that step. A total of 938 works were submitted across South Africa. Of those, 123 were selected for the final round and the 2026 exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum.
This year’s runner-up is 23-year-old painter and mural artist Sive Ntombana from Makhanda, who receives R25,000.
Ntombana’s work, Umlandeli, forms part of his research into trauma in the rural Eastern Cape and looks at how trauma is understood and experienced through a Xhosa cultural lens.
“I work with ingcawe (a traditional Xhosa white blanket featuring a distinct dark or black stripe) and collected ochres to reference the rural,” said Ntombana. “Through collecting and working with ochres, I invoke ukusula, a mural painting practice in the Mpondo rural area, to think about healing in practice and as a practice.”
Five other artists also received Merit Awards worth R10,000 each: Charlie de Bruto from Pretoria, Inga Lokwe from Pretoria, Wisani Manyisi from Johannesburg, Thomas Masingi from Polokwane and Charné Mungur from Gqeberha.
Zondi’s work stood out among a final exhibition filled with works that tackled difficult subjects.
“The laundry of a nation (2026) is an exemplar of how the emerging artists represented in this year’s final exhibition are advancing the tradition of art that tackles the big and difficult questions of life in profound creative registers.” says Sasol New Signatures Chairperson Pfunzo Sidogi. “I sincerely hope that every person who experiences this year’s exhibition of the 123 artworks that made it into the final round, and the exceptional debut solo exhibition, Die Vallei van Adem, by last year’s overall winner Juandré van Eck, will embrace the playful, healing, restorative, questioning, and sometimes adversarial temperament embedded in the various narratives on show.”
The Sasol New Signatures exhibition is now open at the Pretoria Art Museum and runs until 8 November 2026.
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