Justine Mahoney turns to oil paintings in Pareidolia at Southern Guild, Cape Town

Southern Guild Cape Town presents Pareidolia, a new solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Justine Mahoney, on view from February 12 – April 16, 2026. Opening ahead of the 13th edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, the art exhibition marks Mahoney’s first fully realised body of oil-on-canvas paintings and a significant expansion of her practice. “Mahoney’s canvases conjure bodies, matter and atmosphere into a porous meditation on relation, entanglement and the refusal of singular form,” notes Southern Guild in an official release.

Pareidolia is Mahoney’s fourth solo exhibition with the contemporary art gallery and arrives after an extended period of focused experimentation and material inquiry. “Mahoney’s latest body of work reads as a manifesto. Across the last decade, the artist’s practice has unfolded through progressive cycles: autonomous chapters and series that punctuate critical evolutions in her way of thinking and making,” explains Southern Guild. Long recognised for her work across drawing, sculpture and digital collage, Mahoney commits fully to oil painting for this exhibition.

The contemporary artist’s paintings conjure bodies, matter and atmosphere into a fluid meditation on relation, entanglement and becoming. Figures appear to assemble and dissolve, pressing against corporeal limits as limbs morph into tendrils and torsos open into cloud-like negative space. Rather than asserting human dominance, Mahoney’s forms are co-constituted by their environments, collapsing distinctions between human and non-human, animal, plant and organism.

The exhibition’s title, Pareidolia, refers to the cognitive phenomenon of perceiving faces or figures where none ostensibly exist. “For Mahoney, it operates as both method and metaphor. Figures emerge from painterly, dual-toned planes in which sky and earth act as emotional and elemental registers rather than landscape,” notes the gallery. Drawing on Jungian archetypes, posthumanist thought as well as critiques of anthropocentrism, Mahoney rejects the idea of the human as an epistemic centre. Her nude, gender-ambiguous forms resist fixity and categorisation, proposing masculinity and femininity as circulating energies rather than stable identities.

Several works stage the intermingling of paired bodies, invoking creation narratives in which worlds emerge through intimacy and rupture. In Sapientia (The Feminine Aspect of Wisdom), a diptych expands this vision to include multiple figures, echoing canonical Madonna-and-child imagery while reconfiguring it through a queer, archetypal lens.

“Pareidolia moves toward a softening: an embrace of permeability, of edges breached. In refusing singularity and human exceptionalism, Mahoney opens a reciprocal space for renegotiating what it might mean to be human,” concludes Southern Guild.