Image: David Krut Projects, New York
David Krut Projects has announced 'Luxury as Legacy: Printed Work by Mary Sibande', a New York presentation of work on paper by the South African artist made at the David Krut Workshop over the past three years. The exhibition runs from June 25 to September 30, 2026, at David Krut Projects, 526 W 26th St, #816, New York, and brings together a body of prints in which Sibande continues her long-running focus on Sophie, the artist’s recurring figure based on herself and women in her family.
The works examine the politics of leisure through imagery of rest, play and luxury. According to the gallery, Sibande’s practice has often shown Sophie in photographic works or life-size sculptural form, making this her first time depicting the character in print. The presentation includes two series: the 'Leisurely Series', consisting of three woodcut prints completed between 2024 and 2025, and 'The Peephole Series', consisting of eight monotypes completed in 2026.
The prints extend Sibande’s visual language while shifting its tone. In these works, Sophie appears engaged in creative pastimes and surrounded by symbols of luxury, a mode that the gallery links to experiences long denied to Black women under apartheid. The artist’s figure, who has previously embodied rage, political action and remembrance, is here described as appearing at her most content, “playfully refusing” the historical boundaries that restricted access to leisure and self-determination.
David Krut Projects says the series proposes rest and imagination not as indulgences, but as “radical acts of presence.” The compositions are described as simple and dreamlike, inviting viewers into Sophie’s imagined world. The gallery frames that world as one Sibande is claiming for herself and her family, and the prints’ subject matter draws directly on the artist’s recurring use of biography as a point of departure for broader historical reflection.
A featured work in the presentation is 'I’m counting on the waters to carry me through… and drift', 2026, a watercolour monotype with hand painting measuring 85.2 x 73.5 cm. The exhibition is presented by David Krut Arts in New York, which says the works were made at DKW over the last three years.
The announcement also points to related work by Sibande elsewhere in David Krut Projects’ orbit, including a collaboration for 'The Foreign Familiar' at Magugu House in Cape Town, where a new collaborative sculpture by Thebe Magugu and Mary Sibande combines a Victorian silhouette with Basotho blanket textiles worn by Sophie. Alongside that sculpture are prints created by Sibande in collaboration with the David Krut Workshop. The New York exhibition, however, is focused on the work on paper gathered under 'Luxury as Legacy: Printed Work by Mary Sibande'.
