Dumile Feni Exhibition at Museo Reina Sofía Features African Guernica

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid is presenting an exhibition focused on South African artist Dumile Feni from March 25 to September 22, 2026. Curated by Tamar Garb, this show is the inaugural installment of a new series that places artworks from diverse global contexts in dialogue with Picasso's Guernica. The centerpiece is Feni's African Guernica (1965), a monumental charcoal drawing created in Johannesburg that engages with Picasso's anti-war masterpiece while addressing the brutalities of apartheid. This marks the first time the work has traveled outside South Africa. The exhibition includes several other large-scale drawings from the 1960s, such as The Classroom, Woman and Boy, and Saying No, which critique racial segregation and challenge the categorization of Black artists' work as 'native art.' Also featured are later pieces from Feni's exile in London and New York, including a section of a lengthy visual diary and Hector Pieterson (1987), a work inspired by a photograph from the 1976 Soweto uprising. Feni, a largely self-taught artist who was active from the 1940s until his death in the 1990s, developed a distinctive style that blended South African cultural references, myth, and fantasy with a cosmopolitan outlook. His work emerged from Johannesburg's vibrant 1960s creative scene, despite the restrictions of apartheid. The exhibition highlights how Feni's African Guernica represents a conscious engagement with European modernism—particularly through its monochromatic palette, distorted figures, and fragmentation—while also serving as a tribute to his African roots. Curator Garb describes both Guernica and African Guernica as 'anti-totalitarian totems,' though they respond to different forms of violence: Picasso's to wartime bombing, Feni's to systemic racism. The show aims to bring greater visibility to artistic narratives historically marginalized in mainstream art history.