THK Gallery presents I Seek Your Softness, a group exhibition bringing together four painters. Kay-Leigh Fisher (b. 1998) works primarily in monotype printmaking. Through texture, layered colour and absence, her work evokes emotional atmospheres tied to belonging, care and the complexities of domestic space. The second artist is Joëlle Joubert (b. 2000) and she layers painting, drawing and found imagery to explore veiling, sentiment and the shifting boundaries between public and private life. Her work is shaped by processes of concealment and accumulation.
The third artist is Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne (b. 1994), she moves between painting, writing and object-making. Her recent work reflects on memory and emotion, often drawing on personal ritual and the unstable narratives of the everyday. The forth artist is Dineo Ponde (b. 2001) and she works in an expanded field of drawing, incorporating fabric, thread and ink to reflect on memory, time and home.
Through their practice, all four artists embrace ambiguity, using material storytelling to hold personal and collective histories in tension. These artists explore the energy of intimacy and care. In quiet gestures, their paintings reach toward tenderness, marking a shared longing for warmth, connection and presence in a world that feels increasingly sharp. The exhibition responds to this moment with gentleness, holding space for vulnerability and honours the subtle bodily transfers of love and comfort that pass between us. Form, gesture and surface are integral themes to appreciation of the paintings in I Seek Your Softness, some marked by delicate layering, others by broad and expressive strokes.
Unlike overtly conceptual practices, the works in this exhibition turn inward, drawing from embodied processes and the quiet intimacies of daily life. The painters approach the canvas as a site of emotional exchange, where care, vulnerability and presence take material form. One recurring concern binds this varied body of work: the search for softness in a world that feels increasingly brittle.
For these artists, tenderness is not simply a mood, but a method, an active reaching toward others and toward the self. In paint, they chart the boundaries between bodies and emotions, between solitude and support. Here, softness is not a retreat, but a proposition.
The paintings in I Seek Your Softness are built through gesture, repetition and restraint. Surfaces are layered, scraped back and layered again. Colour moves from muted washes to dense, saturated passages. There is attention in the brushwork, a kind of care made visible in how the paint sits, holds, and sometimes pulls away.
Together, these artists offer a shared language of softness, foregrounding slowness, feeling and relation as formal and political gestures.
I Seek Your Softness opened on the 31st of July and will run until the 11th of September 2025 at THK Gallery, Cape Town.
