Two artists. Two very different journeys to the same desert.
Cape Town-based painter Wonder, arrived in the Karoo and found what so many find here — space, silence, and a sky that refuses to end. His canvases respond to that encounter: abstract and expressionist, they map the isolation of objects left behind in a vast landscape, colours shifting as the Karoo light shifts, the aloneness of things both used and forgotten. Wonder has exhibited across South Africa and in Germany, and his work has a way of pulling you in before you've quite decided to look.
Sonia Martins Mateus comes from further away — a Portuguese family displaced by the Salazar dictatorship, a village in Beira Baixa, a practice rooted in territory, memory and what remains after things move or burn.
Her visual language is arid and scorched, her palette ochre, ash and off-white. She works with fire, acid and bleach, attacking material to reveal what lies beneath. Her second return to the Karoo in 2026 — this time to the Great Karoo — continues a body of research into landscape, displacement and the slow transformation of inhabited spaces.
Together in the Prince Albert Gallery, these two works ask the same question from opposite directions: what does a place do to the people who come to it? And what do people leave behind?