Collection: 'Always Becoming' – Anico Mostert

'Always Becoming'

18.03.26 – 25.04.26

In Anico Mostert’s latest body of work, 'Always Becoming', the artist continues her exploration of interiority and shifting states of consciousness. Known for paintings that merge dreamlike terrain with symbolic forms, Mostert’s practice continues toward a fluid and intuitive visual language. These new works invite audiences deeper into the unconscious, toward unfamiliar territory: a landscape made manifest between the known and the unknown, the self and the othered. Here – in flux – a state of mind is shaped by the artist’s gentle propulsion across the spaces of the imagined and subconscious, one that works to soften the blow of an ongoing, and intense inner evolution.

Mostert uses varying combinations of crayon, calico and paint to create these places that dot the map towards further freedom, as they are not spaces of suffering or entrapment. Instead, they suggest a gainful disturbance, offering a moment of recalibration in which the self adjusts to its own unfolding. It is within this pause — the stretch of time between transformations — that the work of ‘becoming’ truly unfolds. Through these compounded layers, glimpses of earlier mark-making remain visible, allowing audiences to follow the works' evolution. Instinctive gestures gradually take form, resembling fragments of intuition that hover just beyond conscious, determinable language. In this way, the paintings also echo the mind’s own attempts to interpret what it senses but cannot fully articulate.

Across Mostert’s synonymous palette of subdued and somnolent tones play with light and focus, depth and distance. Malleability is second nature here, where any definitive lines are lost from the shape of those constantly unlearning and always becoming, and what could be captured, is not free of this ongoing recalibration. Rather than offering answers, the artist’s paintings cultivate questions, encouraging us to linger within uncertainty and to recognise transformation as a shared and enduring condition. Follow Mostert to a place of curiosity that will turn the question, and even the ‘asker’ into another equation, entirely, upending the task of a single answer, for the sake of a roofless room of variables that seek to better satiate such enduring fascination with care and candour.

– Misha Krynauw