CIRCULAR RUINS
Claire Johnson
Michal Korycki
Gabrielle Raaff
Investec Cape Town Art Fair, South Africa
February 2026
Claire Johnson
Oddments Bag #9, Batch #1
2026
Oil on canvas
Oddments Bag #9, Batch #1
2026
Oil on canvas
146 x 125 cm
Claire Johnson
Oddments Bag #9, Batch #2
2026
Oil on canvas
150 x 90 cm
SOLD
Claire Johnson
Oddments Bag #9, Batch #3
2026
Oil on canvas
150 x 90 cm
Claire Johnson
Oddments Bag #8, Batch #1 & 2
2024
Oil on canvas
130 x 182 cm
Claire Johnson
Oddments Bag #8, Batch #3
2024
Oil on canvas
115 x 90 cm
SOLD
Michal Korycki
Complex Torso I
2026
Terracotta washed with stoneware, porcelain
22 x 22 x 41 cm
SOLD
Michal Korycki
The Architect
2026
Terracotta washed with stoneware and porcelain
17 x 14 x 34 cm
SOLD
Michal Korycki
The Hideout
SOLD
The Hideout
2026
terracotta washed with stoneware, porcelain & glazed
20 x 18 x 18 cm
SOLD
Michal Korycki
Assembly
2025
Terracotta washed with stoneware, porcelain & glazed
16 x 26 x 25 cm
SOLD
Michal Korycki
Work 240224
2024
Terracotta washed with stoneware, porcelain & glazed
16 x 10 x 32.5 cm
SOLD
Michal Korycki
Work 240330
2024
Terracotta washed with stoneware, porcelain & glazed
35.5 x 13 x 30 cm
SOLD
Gabrielle Raaff
Permitted Wildness I
2026
Water-based oil and ink on cotton
120 x 140 cm
Gabrielle Raaff
Permitted Wildness II
2026
Water-based oil and ink on cotton
120 x 140 cm
SOLD
Gabrielle Raaff
Arrangement
2026
Water-based oil and ink on cotton
120 x 166 cm
Gabrielle Raaff
Disarrangement
2026
Water-based oil and ink on cotton
96 x 184 cm
Gabrielle Raaff
Making Order III
2026
Water-based oil and ink on cotton
86 x 86 cm
Gabrielle Raaff
Wavelength VI
2026
Ink, oil pastel, crayon & ink on cotton
42 x 59 cm
SOLD
Gabrielle Raaff
Wavelength VII
2026
Water-based oil and ink on canvas
60 x 75 cm
Gabrielle Raaff
Disarray I
2026
Water-based oil and ink on wood
48 x 60 cm
Gabrielle Raaff
Disarray II
2026
Water-based oil and ink on wood
48 x 60 cm
Gabrielle Raaff
Disarray III
2026
Water-based oil and ink on wood
48 x 60 cm
Gabrielle Raaff
Disarray IV
2026
Water-based oil and ink on wood
48 x 60 cm
Disarray IV
2026
Water-based oil and ink on wood
48 x 60 cm
Gabrielle Raaff
Making Order I
2026
Water-based oil and ink on canvas
42 x 30 cm
Gabrielle Raaff
Making Order II
2025
Water-based oil and ink on cotton
28 x 35 cm
SOLD
Circular Ruins
Circular Ruins takes its title from Jorge Luis Borges’ story of a man who dreams another into existence, exploring the fragile boundary between creation, impermanence, and reality. This presentation brings together the practices of Claire Johnson, Michal Korycki, and Gabrielle Raaff, each of whom inhabits a world of fragments, traces, and provisional form, inviting viewers into spaces where meaning remains open and unstable.
In Johnson’s assemblages of fabric, shadows, and overlooked objects, and Korycki’s skeletal clay structures, absence and incompletion become central. Johnson treats fragments of memory as evidence, imbuing the overlooked with narrative weight, while Korycki constructs frameworks that gesture toward solidity but remain vulnerable to collapse. Both practices reflect on what persists and what erodes, revealing that traces and ruins can be as expressive as finished forms.
Raaff’s fluid paintings enter dialogue with Johnson’s archival sensibility. Her watery pigments settle, shift, and dissolve, forming landscapes that hover between recognition and abstraction. Here, process itself is a collaborator: memory, chance, and time act upon the material, allowing meaning to emerge and fade, and emphasizing the instability of perception and recall.
Raaff’s canvases also resonate with Korycki’s engagement with impermanence. In the shifting forms of paint and the eroded surfaces of clay, the artists give physical expression to the passage of time. Structures, images, and memories appear, vanish, and reappear in altered forms, underscoring that creation and decay are inseparable.
Circular Ruins frames these works as part of a continuum between imagination and materiality, presence and absence, intention and surrender. Across fabric, clay, and paint, the presentation suggests that incompleteness is not a deficiency but a mode of encounter — a space where traces, erosion, and chance converge to reveal meaning in its most fragile and compelling form.
“With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another”.
Circular Ruins takes its title from Jorge Luis Borges’ story of a man who dreams another into existence, exploring the fragile boundary between creation, impermanence, and reality. This presentation brings together the practices of Claire Johnson, Michal Korycki, and Gabrielle Raaff, each of whom inhabits a world of fragments, traces, and provisional form, inviting viewers into spaces where meaning remains open and unstable.
In Johnson’s assemblages of fabric, shadows, and overlooked objects, and Korycki’s skeletal clay structures, absence and incompletion become central. Johnson treats fragments of memory as evidence, imbuing the overlooked with narrative weight, while Korycki constructs frameworks that gesture toward solidity but remain vulnerable to collapse. Both practices reflect on what persists and what erodes, revealing that traces and ruins can be as expressive as finished forms.
Raaff’s fluid paintings enter dialogue with Johnson’s archival sensibility. Her watery pigments settle, shift, and dissolve, forming landscapes that hover between recognition and abstraction. Here, process itself is a collaborator: memory, chance, and time act upon the material, allowing meaning to emerge and fade, and emphasizing the instability of perception and recall.
Raaff’s canvases also resonate with Korycki’s engagement with impermanence. In the shifting forms of paint and the eroded surfaces of clay, the artists give physical expression to the passage of time. Structures, images, and memories appear, vanish, and reappear in altered forms, underscoring that creation and decay are inseparable.
Circular Ruins frames these works as part of a continuum between imagination and materiality, presence and absence, intention and surrender. Across fabric, clay, and paint, the presentation suggests that incompleteness is not a deficiency but a mode of encounter — a space where traces, erosion, and chance converge to reveal meaning in its most fragile and compelling form.