A heartfelt celebration marking the artist’s 40-year journey, bringing together reflection, community, and the insistence on personal truth
Senzo Shabangu, We must unite or perish, 2023. Acrylic paint on canvas, 130 x 130cm. Courtesy of the artist.
A Milestone Marked Through Introspection and Creative Continuity
As 2025 draws to a close, South African artist Senzo Shabangu invites audiences into an intimate celebration of his 40-year journey with ‘Stay True To Yourself’, a special exhibition hosted at Moja Boutique Hotel in Midrand. More than a showcase of new works, the exhibition functions as a personal offering, a moment of gathering, and a return to the essence of artistic integrity.
“The highest gallery I respect is the one within the walls of my own heart,” Shabangu reflects in his exhibition text. This sentiment anchors a presentation shaped by introspection and spiritual grounding, reaffirming an artistic philosophy rooted deeply in emotional truth.
An Exhibition Grounded in Honesty and Inner Guidance
His new body of work continues to examine the emotional worlds of the people around him: their resilience, contradictions, tenderness, disappointments, and expectations. Across painting and print, Shabangu maps the interior negotiations that accompany a life in art, and the continual demand to resist performance in favour of authenticity.
For the artist, turning forty is not a milestone of closure but a doorway into a more profound artistic conviction. “I will never stop creating. I was married to the art before I arrived here,” he writes, positioning the exhibition as both a celebration and a quiet act of defiance against a culture defined by surfaces. In a world saturated with noise and curated personas, Shabangu views truthfulness as a radical and necessary discipline.
A Space for Reflection at Moja Boutique Hotel
Installed within the warm, domestic atmosphere of Moja Boutique Hotel, the exhibition encourages slow looking and shared reflection. It is less a formal unveiling and more a communal gesture — an invitation to witness a pivotal moment in the artist’s life and to consider the complexity of becoming oneself in the face of relentless transformation.
‘Stay True To Yourself’ stands as a testament to Shabangu’s longstanding commitment to community-rooted practice, emotional honesty, and creative continuity. It is a reminder, echoing his chosen Oscar Wilde quote, that “everyone else is already taken.”
‘Stay True To Yourself’ opens on 11 December 2025 at Moja Boutique Hotel, 83 Allan Road, Glen Austin AH, Midrand.
