Exhibition Type: Solo Exhibition
Artist(s): Justin Dingwall
Venue: Eclectica Gallery
Address: Church Street, Cape Town
From classical mythology to contemporary art, metamorphosis has remained one of the most enduring themes in visual culture. From the mutable dreamscapes of Salvador Dalí, to the shifting identities of Cindy Sherman, to the butterfly meditations on beauty, life, and mortality by Damien Hirst, artists have long returned to transformation as a way of understanding what it means to become.
It is within this lineage that Justin Dingwall returns to one of the most defining visual languages of his early career: the butterfly.
Years ago, at a formative moment in his practice, Dingwall produced the celebrated Albus series, working with models with albinism such as Thando Hopa and Sanele Xaba. These works challenged inherited ideas of beauty, using butterflies as symbols of transformation, fragility, resurrection, and perception itself. The series helped establish Dingwall’s reputation both locally and internationally.
Yet artists cannot remain in one skin forever.
Having become closely associated with these images, Dingwall moved away from them. What followed were years of experimentation, growth, risk, success, and periods of creative difficulty. Like the chrysalis, this was a necessary season of inward change, unseen, uncomfortable, but essential.
Now, after time and distance, he returns.
Palingenesis, a state of being born again, frames this return. This exhibition is not a repetition of the past, but a re-emergence through it. The butterfly reappears as a symbol, now carrying a deeper resonance. Where the earlier works explored transformation as a social and aesthetic metaphor, these new works reflect the artist’s own evolution.
The exhibition unfolds as a visual progression. It begins with a single butterfly, a quiet sign of possibility. Across the body of work, that presence multiplies until, in the final images, the figure is entirely enveloped. What begins as ornament becomes immersion. What begins externally becomes fully embodied.
In these photographs, the butterfly is no longer simply observed. It becomes identity, memory, burden, beauty, and release. It speaks to the many selves a person inhabits across a lifetime, and to identity as something never fixed.
Importantly, the exhibition reunites past and present through the inclusion of selected earlier works from the original series. These artist proofs, retained after the editions sold out, act as points of origin, rare markers of where the journey began, placed in dialogue with where it has arrived.
This presentation offers a rare opportunity to witness an artist in conversation with his own history, not nostalgically, but with clarity and resolve.
Palingenesis carries a universal truth: while we are born once biologically, we are shaped and reshaped across a lifetime, through hardship, reinvention, loss, courage, and growth.
Transformation is never singular. We do not change only once. We shed many skins across a lifetime.
And sometimes, after years of searching elsewhere, we return to the symbol that first knew us.
