South African art has always capture the distinctive taste of the country, from the 4 000-year-old cave paintings of the latest oil paintings for sale – to the homegrown conceptual art revolution that jumped up as apartheid came to the conclusion in the 1990s.

the San Bushmen, Africa’s eldest hunter-collectors, lived in the enormous Drakensberg series of mountains from 4 000 years ago until they were thrown out by colonialists during the 19th century. Over that time period, they created a great body of art on the walls of caves and rock shelters – the biggest and most concentrated group of rock paintings in sub-Saharan Africa.

This dynamic collection encouragedUnesco to engrave the Drakensberg as a combined natural and cultural world heritage site in 2000. According to UNESCO, these paintings show the spiritual value of the San people” and are “best-in-class both in quality and diversity of subject”.

During the initial colonial period, white South African artists inclined to focus on depicting what they saw as a “fresh world”, in precise detail. Artists such as Thomas Baines explored the country watching its flora, fauna, people and scenes – a kind of reporting for those back in the metropolis.

Towards the culimation of the 19th century, painters Jan Volschenk and Pieter Hugo Naude and the sculptor Anton van Wouw began to setup a locally developed art. Their work – the first view of an artistic vision represented life as lived in South Africa – signified the moment the country started to acquire its own national image, with the 1910 Union of South Africa marking the official end of the colonial period.

In the first decades of the 20th century, the Dutch-born painter JH Pierneef brought a coolly geometric sensibility to the South African landscape; he also, in a way that fed into Afrikaner nationalist ideology, found it bereft of human inhabitants.

By the 1930s, two women performers, Maggie Laubscher and Irma Stern, introduced the techniques and sensibilities of post-impressionism and expressionism to South African art. Their sharp colour and constitutions, and extremely personal viewpoint, rather scandalised those with old-termed concepts of feasible art. Yet younger performers such as Gregoire Boonzaier, Maud Sumner and Moses Kottler were enjoying in this new type of cosmopolitanism.

On the contrary, South African emerging artist like Gerard Sekoto and George Pemba focused on showing their realisms and surroundings in a direct, althoughvehemently expressionist, manner.

From the 1930s onward, Sekoto depicted urban African life in areas such as Sophiatown and District Six, vital and unrestrainedcenters of an emerging though misunderstood black culture.

Progressively, and unavoidably, black artists started to give voice to a political responsiveness that left behind the true depiction of urban life.