Amy Ayanda Lester
I am a multidisciplinary artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. My work explores the space between abstraction and imagination, using vibrant colour, intuitive mark making and layered forms to reimagine botanicals and figures through painting, printmaking and handwork.
My great-grandmother was a land owner flower grower in Strawberry Lane, Constantia. It was declared a white zone during the Group Areas Act of 1955. More recently I have begun to work in oil paint. My paintings are imagined scenes which are made up of references from my own family photographs and found images of the natural world.
My practice is rooted in the tension between inheritance and transformation. It offers me both a connection to the past and a place to imagine anew, where colour is allowed to bleed, where imperfection is intentional and where forms drift between the familiarity of home and the fantastical.
Solo exhibitions:
To See Another, Ground 2025
Tell me what you would miss, RMB Latitudes 2024
Return to Land, Return to Skin, Ground 2019
Selected group exhibitions:
2025 WOMXN MMXXV Hugo Modern Art
2025 Threads of Land, LUMI Gallery
2025 Fiction No End Contemporary
2024 The Motherlode, 6 Spin Street
2022 In Utero RK Contemporary, Riebeek Kasteel
2021African Feminism: Home of The Empties, Goethe-Institut South Africa
2021 2020 Home is Where The Art Is, Zeitz MOCCA 2018
2018 Close Encounters, SMITH STUDIO, Cape Town,
2017 Cape Town Art Fair, Eclectica Contemporary, Cape Town
2017 Folly, SMITH STUDIO, Cape Town
Selected features:
House and Leisure 2025
Living Space 2023
Woman and Home 2023
VISI Magazine 2022, 2023
2019 “Motherhood in Motion: Amy Ayanda Lester’s ‘Return to Land, Return to Skin’ ” Artthrob
Amy Ayanda: The Many Layers of Womxnhood, Texx and the City; Interview with Amy Ayanda, The Fuss