For its inaugural edition, Glenelly Art Project is presented in partnership with SAFFCA (Southern African Foundation for Contemporary Art) and brings together two South African artists with distinctive practices: Chrisél Attewell and Bambo Sibiya.
The exhibition will open at Glenelly Estate on Tuesday, 3 November 2026, from 16h00 to 20h00, and will remain on view by appointment throughout the estate from 4 November 2026 until 30 April 2027.
Art at the heart of Glenelly
Founded by May de Lencquesaing, Glenelly has long been a meeting point between wine, art and heritage.
A passionate collector, May de Lencquesaing has brought together works of art throughout her life, alongside the remarkable collection of antique and contemporary glass now housed at Glenelly.
G + Art continues this cultural commitment by introducing contemporary artistic creation into the living environment of the estate.
Rather than creating a conventional gallery, the Glenelly Art Project invites artists and their works into the architecture and spaces of the winery, allowing art to enter into dialogue with wine, craftsmanship, landscape and place.
Chrisél Attewell and Bambo Sibiya
For this first edition, Glenelly and SAFFCA bring together two South African artists whose practices offer contrasting yet complementary perspectives.
Chrisél Attewell
Chrisél Attewell (b. 1994, South Africa) works across painting, lens-based media, and sculpture. Her practice grows from a tension between love and anger. Love, in her work, includes curiosity, tenderness, and attentiveness toward people, the earth, and what still feels alive. Anger is closely bound to grief: a response to damage, greed, violence, and the loss of what should be protected. She lives in that contradiction, wanting to hold on to the world while also wanting to escape its weight.
Her work begins outside, in the landscapes she moves through and the people she engages with. She wanders, listens, and gathers. Stones, pigments, photographs, and videos become records of encounter. Together, they form a living archive and a way of staying present to the world.
In the studio, these encounters are brought inward and transformed. Through mixing, layering, erasure, and mark-making, the process moves between surrender and control. Play, imagination, and emotion draw the work toward abstraction, making it more personal while softening the edges of what it depicts. The paintings often take on the quality of topographic maps, becoming portals between outer experience and the inner world.
Each work is an act of attentiveness and a resistance to indifference. It is a way to keep caring and to keep looking, even when it hurts to see.
Attewell holds an MAVA from the University of Johannesburg (2023) and a BFA from the University of Pretoria (2016). In 2024, she participated in the Kommagene Biennale in Türkiye, creating a collaborative land art installation titled Hands of Many on Mount Nemrut. Recent solo exhibitions include Rain Shadows (UJ FADA Gallery, 2023), Heat Waves (Berman Contemporary, 2024), and Earth is “a” Story We Inherit (OiR Art Hub, Mongolia, 2025). In 2026, she was a SAFFCA resident at the Abbaye de la Cambre in Brussels, Belgium, followed by a residency at Witklipfontein in the Free State, South Africa. Work developed during the latter was presented at the Villa-Legodi Sculpture Centre at Nirox Sculpture Park in a talk supported by SAFFCA and IFAS.
Bambo Sibiya
Bambo Sibiya
Bambo Sibiya (b. 1986, Springs, South Africa) is a Johannesburg-based visual artist whose practice explores Black identity, memory, cultural inheritance and the continuing construction of self. Working across printmaking, painting, drawing and mixed media, Sibiya combines the disciplined visual language of print with expressive mark-making, layered pattern and portraiture.
His work considers Blackness as a living and continually evolving archive. Figures, textiles, domestic objects and fragments of cultural memory are brought together to examine histories of belonging, displacement, resilience and liberation. Rather than treating identity as fixed, Sibiya approaches it as a palimpsest—formed through the accumulation of personal experience, inherited histories and cultural memory.
His visual language is deeply informed by his experiences in Southern Africa, including the years he spent in Mozambique, and by traditions of African storytelling, textile, portraiture and printmaking. His practice is particularly interested in how ordinary objects, clothing and gestures can become vessels for memory.
Sibiya trained at the Mbira School of Music and Art, Benoni Technical College and Artist Proof Studio in Johannesburg, where he developed his professional printmaking practice. His work has been presented in exhibitions, art fairs and international artistic programmes in South Africa and abroad.
Working between the intimate and the monumental, Sibiya’s practice ultimately asks how images can reclaim histories, create new forms of visibility and affirm the complexity and dignity of Black life.
Together, their works establish a conversation between the intimate and the monumental, the material and the narrative, nature and society.
A new cultural programme for Glenelly
Glenelly Art Project marks the beginning of a broader cultural programme at the estate.
The ambition is for G + Art to evolve through successive editions, inviting artists to engage with Glenelly and creating exhibitions, installations and events that become part of the experience of visiting the estate.
Wine and art share a profound relationship with time, terroir, craftsmanship and transmission. Both begin with a place and a vision; both require patience and human intervention; and both ultimately exist to be experienced and shared.
With G + Art, Glenelly opens a new chapter in that conversation.
“Glenelly has always had art at the heart of its identity. With G + Art, we want to take this a step further by inviting contemporary artists into the estate and creating a genuine dialogue between art, wine and space. Our partnership with SAFFCA and this first exhibition with Chrisél Attewell and Bambo Sibiya mark the beginning of what will become a long-term cultural programme at Glenelly.” - Maxime Bureau, Glenelly Estate
Private viewings
tasting@glenelly.co.za | 021 809 6440
Glenelly Estate, Lelie Street, Stellenbosch, South Africa