Emerging Gqeberha artist Juandré van Eck, the overall winner of the 2025 Sasol New Signatures Visual Arts Competition, will present his first major solo exhibition, Die Vallei van Adem, at the Pretoria Art Museum from 10 September to 8 November 2026.
The exhibition will open alongside the 2026 Sasol New Signatures exhibition, which features 123 selected works from this year’s competition.
Van Eck’s solo exhibition builds on the ideas explored in his winning work, Cycles of the Mind, while taking his practice into a more immersive direction. At its centre is a collection of ceramic sound vessels designed to challenge the conventional relationship between artwork and audience.
Rather than asking visitors to simply look at the sculptures, Die Vallei van Adem invites them to activate them.
Each vessel consists of two connected chambers. When visitors gently move the sculptures, air is drawn through the vessels, passing through water and producing distinctive sounds. The result is an exhibition in which the audience becomes part of the work’s creation.
The individual vessels are designed to sound different according to their size. Smaller works produce higher tones, while larger vessels create deeper sounds. Experienced together, these individual voices form an evolving soundscape that resembles a choir.
As visitors move through the exhibition and interact with the sculptures, they effectively give the works their breath and discover their voices within the exhibition’s titular “valley”.
“Die Vallei van Adem asks people not simply to look at the work, but to activate it. Every interaction gives the sculptures breath and voice, making each visitor part of the artwork itself,” says Van Eck.
The exhibition reflects the development of an artist whose practice has continued to evolve through the Sasol New Signatures platform. Van Eck received a Merit Award in 2024 before being named the competition’s overall winner in 2025.
Sasol Art Curator and Sasol New Signatures judge Cate Terblanche says his work demonstrates the kind of material experimentation and audience engagement the competition aims to encourage.
“Juandré’s work demonstrates a remarkable understanding of material, concept and audience engagement. He transforms ceramics into something that is not only visually compelling but also deeply experiential.”
For Van Eck, the solo exhibition also represents an opportunity to push the ideas behind his practice beyond the scale of a single competition entry.
“Winning Sasol New Signatures has given me the opportunity to push my practice further and realise my ideas on a much larger scale,” he says.
The exhibition will form part of the broader 2026 Sasol New Signatures programme, which continues the competition’s long-running role in identifying and supporting emerging South African artists. This year’s competition received 938 submissions, with 123 works selected for the final exhibition.
Presented together, the two exhibitions offer a look at both the latest generation of emerging South African artists and the continuing development of one of the competition’s recent winners.
Die Vallei van Adem and the 2026 Sasol New Signatures exhibition open to the public at the Pretoria Art Museum on 10 September 2026 and run until 8 November 2026.
