On show from Tuesday, 24 March 2026 at Tokara Wine and Olive Estate, this exhibition is a tribute to the acclaimed South African artist and jazz-lover: Sam Nhlengethwa. His work is shown alongside pieces rooted in the Southern African music scene by Michael Beckurts and Lucas Bambo.
The exhibition coincides with Jazz weekend in the Cape:
The Montreux Jazz Festival has been a fixture of the global jazz calendar for nearly six decades, and over the years, has launched partner festivals in a handful of cities around the world. For the first time on the African continent, the Montreux Jazz Festival: Franschhoek takes place from Friday the 27th to Sunday the 29th of March. Posters for the main festival at Lake Geneva have been designed by artists like Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Keith Haring, and Damien Hirst. For this inaugural Franschhoek festival, Sam Nhlengethwa was selected to design the official festival poster. We are thrilled to be bringing more of his work to the Winelands.
On the same weekend, the 23rd edition of the Cape Town International Jazz Festival takes place in the city centre, where artist Michael Beckurt frequents live music gigs to draw performers and spectators in his ongoing Concert Drawing series. He has composed three limited edition digital prints of these drawings specially for Compositions (and all that Jazz). The coda to our exhibition is the portfolio of 21 linocuts by Pretoria-based artist Lucas Bambo, which were reproduced in the 2025 biography of the late mbira master Cosmas Magaya, written by ethnomusicologist and jazz-specialist Paul Berliner and published by the University of Chicago Press.
Sam Nhlengethwa
Salif Keita
(Acrylic, oil and collage on canvas)
Sam Nhlengethwa
Take I (detail)
(Two colour chine collé lithograph on paper)
San Nhlengethwa
Born in 1955, Sam Nhlengethwa is one of South Africa’s foremost artists. Having studied at Rorke’s Drift and the Johannesburg Art Foundation, he worked in set design at the SABC, where, encouraged by the work of his hero in art, Romaire Bearden, he developed his interest in juxtaposing collage and original mark-making. His accolades include the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year award in 1994. He is currently represented by Goodman Gallery. His work is largely figurative and explores themes that have resonated with him throughout his life such as jazz, human interactions and the physical space of contemporary Africa.
Nhlengethwa produced his first lithographs at the Artists’ Press in 1994 with a series of five prints inspired by jazz, and has revisited the theme time and again. He specifically refers to Miles Davis’ album ‘Kind of Blue’ as his “jazz bible”.
While he works, Nhlengethwa plays this, and other influential jazz records, from his extensive library of vinyl albums. He enjoys the synchronicity of his process with that of jazz musicians, who continuously improvise to create new forms and patterns of sound. The artist collages fragments of photographic imagery with differing perspectives, inventing new configurations and juxtaposing these against his original backgrounds.
Miles Davis is joined by John Coltrane in Take 1. In Score reading, pressed close physically, Coltrane out of scale with Davis, the two are juxtaposed as each considers the jazz score as if in their own worlds. A feature of the exhibition, because he is scheduled to perform in Franschhoek on Saturday 28 March, is Nhlengethwa’s portrait painting with collage of Salif Keïta (shown courtesy of Goodman Gallery), widely regarded as the ‘Golden Voice of Africa’.
The exhibition includes lithographs of sketches made by Sam Nhlengethwa during a residency in Senegal in 2024. While not directly related to jazz, these scenes of daily life offer a rare glimpse into the artist’s personal drawings.
All Nhlengethwa’s limited editions have been printed with Mark Attwood at The Artists Press in Mpumalanga. This press was founded in 1991 by Mark Attwood, its accredited Master Printer, and Tamar Mason. Sam Nhlengethwa was one of the first artists to print with them and still continues to do so.
Note: The lithographs on show are framed. Additional prints from these limited editions are available, either framed or unframed, and can be ordered through our website (see the links below) or directly from Artists Press at the same price. The Artists Press couriers from their studio in Mpumalanga.
Michael Beckurts
Late night jazz session, Woodstock
(giclée (digital) print on Hahnemühle paper)
Lucas Bambo
A Prodigy’s Calling portfolio, Chapter 12, Children listen mbira (linocut on acid-free paper)
Michael Beckurts: concert drawings
Michael Beckurts is a young Capetonian who, like Sam Nhlengethwa, always has his sketchbook nearby. He composes digital drawings, made in real time, during jazz and electronic music performances. These drawings of musicians and audience members are projected onto a wall in the space, live, as he is creating them. It’s a kind of performance art happening alongside the musical performance. For our exhibition, he has combined three arrangements of these sketches, capturing how the performers and the crowd are affected by and connected through the music. These are available in limited editions of 10, framed and unframed.
Lucas Bambo: A prodigy’s calling
The mbira has been played in Africa for over a thousand years, and as an instrument, like jazz as a form of music, is rooted in Africa. Playing or listening to music is most often a community experience. In the case of the mbira (the national instrument of Zimbabwe), its musical purpose is primarily for community kinship. Played at festivities and commemorative events, mbira sounds are not only appreciated in the moment of the performance, but also provide passages into the past. Musicians are vital to enabling communication with the ancestors, and the patterns in the musical compositions support people being able to move into spiritual states.
Lucas Bambo was commissioned to create a portrait cover and 20 linocuts to illustrate each chapter of A Prodigy’s Calling: The Early Musical Biography of Cosmas Magaya, Zimbabwean Mbira Master, by ethnomusicologist Paul F. Berliner in 2024. Bambo’s images capture the relationship of this renowned mbira master to his music and his community, tracing his life in rural Zimbabwe. Paul Berliner met Cosmas Magaya when researching music in Zimbabwe in the 1970s. He was taught to play the mbira by Magaya, and the two became close friends and a fêted musical duo, performing and teaching together for many years until Magaya’s untimely passing in 2020.
See our detailed post about the A prodigy’s calling Portfolio, which shows the works in their narrative order. Bambo’s linocuts are limited to editions of 50, available as a complete set of 21 scenes, or as individual prints, framed or unframed.
View all the works in the exhibition below: click on a thumbnail to give you details about the work.
Visit the exhibition in person at Tokara Wine and Olive Farm, on the Helshoogte Pass, Stellenbosch
For more details about the art, contact us on info@juliameintjes.co.za
Limited editions
A Prodigy’s Calling: Complete portfolio comprising 21 linocuts 2/50
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Paintings
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Paintings
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