PRESS RELEASE
PAUL WALLINGTON | Messengers
Sep 26 – Oct 25, 2026
Paul Wallington | Messengers
Opening reception: 26 September 2026 at 11:00
After over three years of studying abroad I spent April & May this year in Knysna (where I went to school) painting for this exhibition. My family had sold the house in Plettenberg Bay where I grew up and I couldn’t’ help feeling a sense of estrangement on returning as a visitor rather than a resident.
How do you paint the feeling of losing your childhood home? What does homesickness look like? There are moments that are real, like the roads I spent so long commuting from Plett to Knysna, or the flowers that bloomed up the road from me as a boy or the drip castles I made as a child but I had to bring in a Messenger as a way of reconciling that fact. It is a way of moving forward. A way of sending my condolences to a place I cannot get back to.
Who are the Messengers to a place that exists in memory? I think of bats, capable of flying back into the darkness of memory. Men in suits with their backs turned to us. Looking at something we cannot see. Men who are all grown up, isolated on sandy planes or empty chairs, as if someone has just gotten up. This show is a way to get back to a place that only lives in memory.
- Paul Wallington
Paul Wallington (b.1993) is a painter who lives in Cape Town, South Africa. He graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2019, where he was co-awarded the Simon Gerson Award for Outstanding Body of Work, and then studied in Hamburg, Germany.
