When Candice Berman opens her new art gallery on Wednesday it will be more than just an expansion, it will be a pointed intervention.
The new space, in the Silo District at Cape Town's V&A Waterfront, will be a women-only gallery dedicated to amplifying female artists.
“Cape Town is rich with galleries and institutions, but women’s artistic voices are still treated as peripheral. This space is about visibility, critical engagement and recognition — it’s about saying women belong at the very centre of contemporary discourse,” Berman told the Sunday Times.
“This gallery is both a correction and a provocation. We’re not asking for permission to be included — we’re building the stage ourselves.”
The gallery is an extension of Berman Contemporary, the Johannesburg gallery known for championing contemporary voices.
It opens on Wednesday with its first show, Contours Unveiled. Six artists — DuduBloom More, Inga Kay Lokwe, Lee-At Meyerov, Mellaney Roberts, Chrisél Attewell and Mandy Johnston — will headline the exhibition.
Together, their practices echo what Berman calls “the multiple ways women shape their worlds — delicate or forceful, fragmentary or continuous, but always present".
The move comes amid growing scrutiny of representation in the South African art world. Despite women dominating art school enrolments and increasingly winning awards, their work is still underrepresented in major collections and exhibitions. Globally, the gap is even starker: according to art market analysis, women artists make up less than 5% of auction sales.
A Monash University-led study found that artworks by female artists made up less than 4% of art auction sales between 2000 and 2017, even though the number of men and women enrolling in fine art degrees was fairly equal.
A 2025 report by research company ArtTactic shows that female African artists achieved slightly over half of auction sales last year — a large increase on the number of women represented in 2023.
Phillippa Duncan, founder of Vault Research, a space for art advisory, conservation and research, said that in recent years women artists had been increasingly featuring on the international scene and so this was a good time for an all-women gallery to open.
She said the gallery could be regarded as “a very brave move”.
“Berman has considerably upped the game with this exhibition and artists who are increasingly contemporary; their work is new, and deals with the issues all women are facing and that have been sidelined previously.
“I reckon we are ready for an all-women project. The Cape Town Art Fair in January is predominantly women-run. But Cape Town does have a reputation for not receiving outsiders immediately, so Berman will have to keep that peculiarity in mind.”
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