IEA News
CAPE TOWN
Over many years, the Cape Town art collector Georgina Jaffee has assembled an unusually focused and expansive collection of contemporary art guided by a singular conceptual premise: hair as subject, material and metaphor. Spanning painting, photography, sculpture, textile works and even hybrid installations, and uniquely also foregrounding African and Afro-descendant perspectives, the collection is distinguished by both its conceptual clarity and historical depth.
The single-owner sale Hair Matters: A Selection of Works from the Georgina Jaffee Collection presents 41 works by artists including Ifeoma U. Anyaeji, Sethembile Msezane, Sabelo Mlangeni, Richard Mudariki, Tracey Rose, Hank Willis Thomas and Dominique Zinkpè. Previewed in an exhibition at Lemkus Gallery in December 2025 and currently on view at Strauss & Co’s Woodstock gallery in Cape Town, the sale of Jaffee’s extraordinary collection will take place on 21 February 2026 at 4pm.
“Rather than responding to the market, this collection is grounded in lived experience and sustained dialogue, shaped by Georgina Jaffee’s personal relationship to hair as a marker of her own identity,” says Kirstie Pietersen, Head of Sale, Strauss & Co. “The collection demonstrates how an intimate subject can open onto wider questions of power, race, gender and resistance. While the works engage contemporary practice, they are also rooted in history.”
Highlights include Ifeoma U. Anyaeji’s A No M’eba, Ma Na Anoho Mu Eba (I Am Here, But I Am Not Here – Presence, Absence) (estimate R400 000–600 000), an installation composed of braided plastic bags shown with a wooden chair and plinth, and Dominique Zinkpè’s Petite Princesse (Small Princess) (estimate R150 000–200 000), an assemblage of hand-sculpted and painted Ìbejì votive figures that form a large figure with matted hair. They are presented alongside historically significant works by Drum photographer Bob Gosani and Fikile Magadlela, a key figure in Black Consciousness art of the 1970s and co-founder of the Soweto Art Association.
Taken together, the works in Hair Matters offer a nuanced examination of the aesthetics, politics and social meanings of hair, with particular emphasis on African contexts and the connective threads linking the continent to its global diasporas. Artists in the sale represent a wide geographic spread, including Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Chile, China, Congo, Israel, Nigeria, South Africa, the United States and Zimbabwe.