Kagiso Patrick Mautloa turns the porous boundary between city and studio into a living portrait of Johannesburg at the Bag Factory.
18 August 2026
For more than seven decades, Kagiso Patrick Mautloa has watched Johannesburg shift, fracture, rebuild and reinvent itself. In ‘Face(t)s of the City’, the veteran artist brings this accumulated intimacy with the metropolis into the Bag Factory gallery, presenting Johannesburg not as a fixed subject, but as a restless material language.
Drawings, layered paintings, multimedia collages and Mautloa’s distinctive sculptures trace the textures of inner-city life, where discarded objects, worn surfaces, street economies and everyday gestures become repositories of memory. His practice looks beyond familiar narratives of urban hardship and decline, finding instead the stubborn vitality of those who inhabit the city and continually make life within it.
Crucially, ‘Face(t)s of the City’ is not simply an exhibition of completed works. Mautloa brings part of his famously overflowing studio into the gallery, where he will continue working on ambitious large-scale paintings throughout the exhibition. Visitors are invited into this porous space of making, observation and exchange, encountering both artist and city in motion.
Opening during the Bag Factory’s 35th anniversary year, the exhibition celebrates its longest-standing artist and an enduring figure in Johannesburg’s cultural imagination.
This exhibition will be on view at the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios from 20 August to 19 September 2026.
