PEELS ON FRIDAY

“Peels on Friday” is a monumental Acrylic painting steeped in history, irony, and urban memory — a layered tribute to a once-iconic Johannesburg landmark. The title, a serendipitous misspelling of “Piels on Friday,” adds to the piece’s uniqueness, echoing a phrase long familiar to inner-city residents: a nod to the unforgettable stench that drifted through Newtown every Friday morning as workers hosed down the cold storage floors of Piels Sausage Factory — a ritual that left an imprint on the collective consciousness of the city.

Built in 1892 by German entrepreneur Albert Piels, the factory once stood as a beacon of Johannesburg’s industrial rise. A century later, in 1992, this painting was created — capturing the building not in its prime, but in its poetic decline, just before demolition. Its faded grandeur is rendered in visceral detail: rust-bleeding roofs, a towering smokestack, shattered windows, graffiti-smeared walls, and the ghost of a fading slogan: “FAMOUS QUALITY MEAT PRODUCTS.”

But this isn’t nostalgia — it’s truth. The foreground reveals a gritty street scene etched in lived realism: minibus taxis rumble past, a homeless figure relieves himself against the crumbling façade, and storm clouds muscle into the bright blue sky. The result is a breathtaking juxtaposition of beauty and neglect, memory and loss.

At an impressive 2000mm x 1500mm, the sheer scale of “Peels on Friday” commands attention — not just as a record of what once was, but as a poignant portrait of a city forever transforming. In honouring what has been erased, it becomes a monument to presence, absence, and the strange poetry of forgotten corners.