Local artist Stephan Hobbs has captivated the art world with his recent installations, Mnara and Porous Structures. The striking timber tower, Mnara, presented at the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF), draws attention to the unfinished and fragile nature of construction sites throughout the city. Meanwhile, his Porous Structures exhibition, at David Krut Projects in Parkwood, provides a complementary exploration of similar themes through printmaking and architectural forms. Together, these projects create a profound dialogue on the precarious beauty of the built environment, reflecting Hobbs’s deep-rooted engagement with both urban and rural spaces.

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Mnara pays tribute to improvised building techniques and the tension between modern construction and indigenous knowledge. The installation reflects on places caught in time – sites where nature begins to reclaim abandoned or paused building works. Hobbs’s work encourages viewers to think about the balance between permanence and impermanence in the urban environment.

David Krut Projects has long supported Hobbs’s printmaking, which often runs in parallel with his architectural commissions. The Parkwood gallery’s three-week exhibition allowed Hobbs to further explore ideas sparked by Mnara, showing how prints and constructions converse across different media.

Building the tower was both a creative and practical challenge, with Hobbs and his assistant, Teboho Mofokeng, carefully piecing together timber elements to reach 6m in height. The experience brought unexpected insights, such as comments from an international curator about rooftop gardens, which Hobbs found particularly inspiring.

For Hobbs, the relationship between printmaking and installation work is a continuous dialogue. His practice blends the long-term planning of architectural projects with the visual storytelling of print, creating layered explorations of place, memory, and time.

Although Mnara was not directly created in collaboration with the David Krut Workshop, the support and platform provided, through Porous Structures, helped extend the conversation. Hobbs’s work remains an invitation to consider Johannesburg’s evolving landscape and the stories held within its structures.

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