From immersive paintings to fragmented figures and the layered language of calligraphy, this year’s House & Garden South Africa Artist of the Year nominees reflect the breadth of contemporary art being made today.
Zarah Cassim, Sundus Saad Altalib, Mmangaliso Nzuza and Kamyar Bineshtarigh each approach their practices differently, but all four are interested in how art can hold memory, identity, place, and perception.
Here, we meet the four artists shortlisted for the 2026 Artist of the Year award.
Zarah Cassim
For Zarah Cassim, painting is a way of questioning what we see. The Cape Town-born artist is interested in perception and the ways in which an artwork can manipulate our understanding of space, form, and reality.
Working across painting and textile, Cassim creates surfaces that can feel simultaneously familiar and elusive. Natural forms and landscapes become vehicles for disorientation, while spatial illusions invite the viewer to look twice. There is a tension between the tangible beauty of the painted mark and the uncertainty of the worlds she creates.
Cassim graduated with an Honours in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town in 2014 and has exhibited extensively in South Africa and internationally. Her recent solo exhibitions include The Banquet in 2026, Bed Full of Flowers in 2025, and Under the Sun in 2024 at 99 Loop Gallery. She currently lives and works between Paris and Cape Town.
Sundus Saad Altalib
An emerging voice whose practice brings together material, heritage and sustainability, Sundus Saad Altalib works with textiles to explore the relationship between history and the present.
Her work Mesopotamia, which was selected as a finalist for the 2025 Sasol New Signatures competition, offers a particularly clear insight into her approach. Created using banana silk on hardwood, the work draws on Altalib’s paternal heritage and the history of Mesopotamia as a centre of innovation, trade, and cultural exchange.
Altalib has also been included in Pretty Serious, a 2026 Cape Town exhibition bringing together artists working across painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, collage, and fibre art. Her inclusion in this year’s Artist of the Year shortlist places a growing spotlight on a practice where craft, materiality, and cultural memory intersect.
Mmangaliso Nzuza
Mmangaliso Nzuza’s large-scale oil paintings are populated by figures that seem both deeply familiar and slightly otherworldly. Born in Empangeni in 1998 and now based in Cape Town, Nzuza has developed a distinctive visual language in which fragmented bodies, atmospheric colour, and imagined landscapes come together.
His route into art was unconventional. Nzuza completed an MA (Hons) in Government, Policy and Society at the University of Edinburgh in 2022 before returning to South Africa to pursue art. Beginning with pencil and charcoal, he eventually moved into oil painting, developing a style that draws on the fragmentation of early Cubism while retaining a distinctly personal sense of gesture and emotion.
His debut solo exhibition, An Open Letter, opened at Southern Guild in Cape Town in 2024. In 2026, he presented Ballad of the Peacock, which inaugurated Southern Guild’s New York gallery and marked his solo debut in the United States.
Kamyar Bineshtarigh
For Iranian-born, Cape Town-based artist Kamyar Bineshtarigh, language is both material and subject.
His multidisciplinary practice examines communication, migration and displacement, with Arabic script and calligraphy becoming recurring points of departure. Instead of treating writing simply as a carrier of information, he considers its visual qualities – its marks, forms, layers, and textures – and what happens to meaning when language moves between cultures.
This interest is visible in his layered works, where canvas, ink, pencil, glue, paint, and even fragments of glass can become part of the surface. His practice often builds up, creating dense works in which accumulated marks suggest histories, traces, and the passage of time.
Bineshtarigh’s practice has earned significant recognition, including the Simon Gerson Prize in 2021, the Bowmans Young Artist Award in 2022, and the Ruth Prowse Award for his work An Exhaustive Catalogue of Texts Dealing with the Orient. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Contemporary Art from Cape Town Creative Academy in 2024.
His recent exhibitions and projects have continued to place questions of language, cultural translation, and displacement at the centre of his work.
Four artists, four ways of seeing
What connects this year’s Artist of the Year nominees is not a single aesthetic, medium or subject, but a willingness to use art as a way of looking more closely. Together, their practices offer a snapshot of the breadth of contemporary art being produced in and from South Africa today.
The 2026 House & Garden South Africa Designer of the Year Awards will take place on 30 September at Steyn City, where the winner of the Artist of the Year category, alongside the winners of the other DOTY categories, will be revealed.
