Cornè Theron Returns to South Africa with ‘Nymphéas:
Les Femmes Émergentes’ — In Conversation with Monet

First Solo Show on Home Soil Since 2019

Cape Town, 10 December 2025 – 33BREE is pleased to present Nymphéas : Les Femmes Émergentes, a solo exhibition by South African artist Cornè Theron — her first solo presentation on South African soil since being awarded a “talent passport” by the French Government in 2019.

The exhibition opens on 9 January 2026 and runs until 7 February 2026, promising a powerful return that weaves memory, femininity, and subtle histories using a layered visual language of abstraction.

About the Exhibition

Through oil paintings and mixed-media works, the artist reflects on the women who shaped her life — mothers, grandmothers, ancestors — and the fragile, often invisible threads of care, memory, and resilience that weave across generations. The earliest impulse for Nymphéas comes from the artist’s childhood memories of her grandmother’s lily pond on a Free State farm. In this exhibition, memory becomes a lens through which to see. Water itself becomes both subject and archive.
Her distinctive pixelated visual language adds a contemporary pulse to these reflections, suggesting how perception fragments and reforms as we move through time. The show enters into dialogue with the legacy of water and myth — and with the late water-lily paintings of Claude Monet, created when his vision began to fade and the world before him dissolved toward abstraction.
The exhibition invites contemplation on identity, lineage, and endurance — on how memory, heritage, and the faint ripple of water hold us. This show is a meaningful homecoming: a re-rooting of an internationally minded practice in South African soil.

Quote from the Artist

“I return to South Africa with Nymphéas as a quiet pond of memory, where women, water and reflection meet — to honour what has shaped me and to reveal the unseen connections that sustain us.”

Artist Background (Highlights)

Cornè Theron is an internationally exhibited artist with four successful solo shows across Europe. Her 2023 solo in Kassel — held in a former documenta venue — was highlighted as a notable international solo by Artsy, garnering attention in European art circles. Her work has been reviewed by respected art historians and curators, including Dr Sonja Lechner and Dr Alexander Leinemann from the Hannover Museum in Germany. Publications featuring her work include Kassel StadtZeit, Madame (Germany), and Grazia (Germany). Among her collectors is former CEO of Artsy, Mike Steib. Currently she is collaborating with the Sarrebourg Museum in France on a site-specific installation in the historic Chapelle des Cordeliers, placing her photography and glass filter installations, in conversation with the chapel’s stained-glass window "La Paix" by Marc Chagall. This special installation forms part of the 50-year celebration of the Chapelle, with a planned opening on 23 May 2026, and the annual Night of the Museum in France.