South Africa is home to some of the most ancient and beautiful art in the world - the rock art of the ancestors of today's Bushman or San. It is also the scene of a host of vibrant and challenging contemporary artists producing new and important work. The apartheid years of South African history (1948-1994) saw a great diversity in South African art, ranging from landscape painting to abstract art, engagements with currents burgeoning in Europe and the United States, to a fiercely local sense of what it meant to be an artist in this country during troubled times.

Sometimes South African art seemed to float above the political issues of the day; at other times it tackled them with vigour and insight.