South African artist Phumulani Ntuli invites viewers to pause, reflect and perhaps recognise themselves in Wish List, a new solo exhibition opening at the David Krut Gallery in Parkwood on February 14.

Presented in collaboration with the David Krut Workshop, the exhibition brings together a series of intimate mixed media works on paper that explore desire, aspiration and the subtle pressures of contemporary consumer culture.

Drawing from the visual clutter of everyday life, online advertisements, handwritten notes, wrapping paper and receipts, Ntuli assembles fragments that speak to how longing is shaped in an increasingly digital world.

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Rather than grand gestures, Wish List is marked by restraint. The works are small in scale, limited in colour and deliberately pared down. By restricting his palette to just two or three tones and using minimal chine-collé elements, Ntuli shifts focus to clarity and composition, allowing each piece to breathe. The result is a quieter, more contemplative body of work than his larger, more layered pieces.

Each artwork functions as both an archive and a mirror. Wish Lists are no longer private scraps of paper tucked away in notebooks; they now exist as digital records, saved items, online carts, screenshots and purchase histories.

Ntuli reconfigures these traces into visual inventories that map the tension between need and fantasy, self and society, utility and ornament.

There is also a strong art-historical undercurrent running through the exhibition. Ntuli’s use of fragmentation and juxtaposition echoes the concerns of American surrealist and post-surrealist artists of the 1960s and 70s, who grappled with a world that felt increasingly mediated and irrational.

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In Wish List, that sense of surrealism feels uncannily familiar, a reflection of modern life where the virtual and tangible constantly overlap.

At its heart, the exhibition asks uncomfortable but necessary questions: What do our possessions say about us? How do access and affordability shape our desires? And what does it mean to want in a world that constantly tells us what we should have?

Wish List opens on February 14, at 11:00 at the David Krut Gallery, The Blue House, 151 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood. The exhibition offers a thoughtful and quietly powerful lens on contemporary longing, one that lingers long after the viewer leaves the gallery space.

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