ESSAY: Jan Neethling and Robert Hodgins | On Friendship and Form

A special project at RMB Latitudes Art Fair, curated by Lucy MacGarry

Each year, RMB Latitudes Art Fair presents ESSAY, a dedicated curatorial project that brings together focused dialogues between South African artists across generations. Conceived and curated annually by RMB Latitudes Co-Director Lucy MacGarry, the programme explores themes of lineage, influence, memory, and material thinking, pairing practices not often seen in direct conversation and offering new perspectives on both established and under-recognised figures within the field.

Since its inception in 2019, ESSAY has evolved into a considered and increasingly ambitious platform within the Fair. Early iterations focused on bringing lesser-seen bodies of work into view, while more recent presentations have developed into nuanced cross-generational conversations, foregrounding both continuity and divergence within South African art history.

In 2023, ESSAY brought together Sam Nhlengethwa, Katlego Tlabela, and Cinthia Sifa Mulanga in a layered dialogue across generations. In 2024, the focus shifted to the collaborative practice of Wendy Vincent and Geoffrey Armstrong, reflecting on over two decades of shared production. The 2025 edition paired the late Sydney Kumalo with Amalie von Maltitz, exploring intersections between sculpture and drawing, and the ways in which material and form carry meaning across time.

The 2026 iteration of this annual special project centres on the work of Jan Neethling, presented in dialogue with a focused selection of works by his former teacher and lifelong friend, Robert Hodgins. Bringing their practices into close proximity, the exhibition considers how influence, exchange, and sustained dialogue unfold over time, shaped as much by friendship and critique as by individual artistic trajectories.

Jan Neethling tending to a bonsai trees, 2025 - a parallel practice of patience and form, where observation unfolds slowly over time.

On Friendship and Form foregrounds this relationship, offering a lens through which to engage with both artists’ work, while positioning Neethling’s practice with renewed clarity and focus.

“Jan Neethling’s paintings are marked by restless figuration and shifting, unstable terrains, where portraiture, still-life and landscape collapse into dense, compressed compositions. Shaped through decades of exchange, friendship and sustained dialogue, these works are at once vividly observed and psychologically charged.” - Lucy MacGarry.

Jan Neethling - Five Seasons -2015-Acrylic on Board-121x76.

What follows is an essay by David Mann, written in advance of the exhibition at RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2026.

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Confused Landscapes: Observation and Influence in the Work of Jan Neethling and Robert Hodgins

By David Mann

Influence can be found anywhere, but it’s often those closest to us who have the most profound impact on our work. This year, RMB Latitudes’ Special Project, ESSAY, centres on the work of Jan Neethling, presented in dialogue with that of his former teacher and lifelong friend, Robert Hodgins.

It’s an overcast Wednesday morning in Johannesburg, and the road to Neethling’s Midrand home is pockmarked with potholes. “Best to take a slow approach on the road in,” he texted earlier that morning. On the drive over, business parks, uniform townhouse clusters, and co-working hubs filter past the window, all recent developments. It would have looked far different in the 1970s, when Neethling first moved here, when the stretch between Johannesburg and Pretoria was much flatter.

Neethling, now 87, is waiting at the gate in a white jersey matching his hair. Many rooms make up the farmhouse-style home in which Neethling resides, each one of them packed to the rafters with artworks. Some carry familiar names—Deborah Bell and Paul Stopforth—but most are by Hodgins and Neethling. At a cursory glance, you might not be able to tell them apart.

“I think you can certainly see his impact on my work when you look at it,” says Neethling, gesturing around the room. “I liked Rob’s work immediately and I believed in it, so it became a big influence on my own work.”

Robert Hodgins -Untitled - Oil on Canvas.

Both Hodgins and Neethling were born in London, about 18 years apart, and moved to South Africa when they were very young. It was at the Tshwane University of Technology (then named Technikon Pretoria) that the two first met. Hodgins was a lecturer in the Fine Art department, and Neethling was a second-year student, pursuing art after having developed an affinity for it in high school. Neethling recalls their first meeting, Hodgins playfully reprimanding him for wearing jeans to a college where the convention at the time was very much suit-and-tie.

After college, the two became fast friends, meeting regularly to paint and chat. While Hodgins went on to have an internationally renowned career as a painter, Neethling remained relatively unknown outside of Johannesburg for most of his career, despite painting regularly and exhibiting since the 1970s. Seated on the couch, Neethling recalls the incongruous evolution of their careers as being a necessary one. He had much to learn from Hodgins, he says, and Hodgins benefited from Neethling’s feedback and support.

“He was an early mentor, but he also became my best friend. So I admired him and supported him in equal measure,” says Neethling.

Both artists have gravitated towards the rogues of society in their work—politicians, businessmen, oligarchs, drug lords and gangsters—and produced expressionistic representations of these malevolent figures, at once studying and satirising their ill-gained authority.

“He maintained that my work did influence him, but I don’t think so. He was very much his own artist, and he wasn’t influenced by many people. His influences were well-known international names, but whose aren’t?”

Still, while Neethling’s career never achieved the same visibility as Hodgins’, his work ultimately developed into its own style. Neethling’s frenetic figures govern his canvases. His busy, expressive style belies a technical skillset that sees him working with colour and detail to brilliant ends.

A painter of “life on the move”, even his landscape and still-life works bristle with a restless presence. Like Hodgins, Neethling is a great observer and chronicler of human activity. With much of his early career taking place in a country at odds with itself, Neethling painted what he saw: distorted figures and forms, feverish and contested landscapes, and a growing cast of grotesque characters in positions of power.

Robert Hodgins - Untitled - Circa 1990-2000- Oil on Canvas - 45 x 60.

“I didn’t want to just paint a plain landscape. I painted what I saw, you know, neither myself or Rob painted towards an idea or a title, we painted images from the world, from the media we were consuming, and allowing the paintings to emerge in that way. So, you end up with these conflicted figures moving through confused landscapes,” explains Neethling.

Of the works by Neethling featured in ESSAY, there are landscapes, portraits, still-lifes, and wonderfully surreal mixtures of all of these things at once. This cross-pollination of style and reference is something of a signature of his. The stately legs of a table inside a still-life, for example, might easily be swapped out for the pompous nose and tight-lipped smile of a pinstriped businessman in another painting.

Over the course of their 50-year friendship, Neethling and Hodgins met regularly. They also argued, constantly. “Sometimes about painting, but mostly about life,” says Neethling. “It was very much a part of our friendship.”

When Hodgins lived in Westdene, he’d most often be found at Neethling’s Midrand home, cooking them meals and discussing his work. After multiple break-ins, however, Hodgins sought to move and Neethling offered him a room and a studio in his own home. So it was that Hodgins spent the last 16 years of his life in Neethling’s home.

Jan Neethling, Make Up, 2018- acrylic on canvas- 80 x 50.

Today, Hodgins’ old studio stands largely unchanged, still filled with endless canvases, most completed, some unfinished. Even his old room remains untouched; a black-and-white portrait of him seated in an armchair, smartly dressed in a shirt and tie, hangs on the bedroom wall.

Neethling still paints. His studio is alive with works in process, while reference images and news clippings adorn the walls. “I try to paint a little each day,” says Neethling, moving through the space. “I get tired so much quicker these days.”

Jan Neethling in his studio, 2025, surrounded by works in process.

It’s true that Hodgins was both a friend and a mentor to Neethling, as well as a source of constant inspiration and energy to create. But Neethling’s technical ability, both as a painter and a printmaker, saw him serving as an invaluable critic and collaborator in Hodgins’ work, contributing enormously to his career over the years.

Though this is not the first time the two artists have shown work together, this year’s ESSAY at RMB Latitudes Art Fair marks a significant moment in Neethling’s career, one that brings his work into renewed focus within a broader public context. Here, among the bristling landscapes, striking still-lifes, and curious cast of characters, Neethling presents a body of work that is at once observant of the world and singularly alive within it.