Iris Ampenberger was born in Cape Town in 1916 and received her early art training in Port Elizabeth before continuing her studies in Johannesburg. She married the artist Stefan Ampenberger, and together the couple travelled throughout South Africa for seventeen years in a caravan, drawing, painting, and exhibiting as they moved from region to region. This long period of mobility shaped both artists’ practices and placed them within a wider network of South African painters working outside major urban centres.

In the mid-1960s the Ampenbergers settled in Thaba ’Nchu in the Free State, where they became associated with the Bloemfontein Group, founded in 1958 by Father Frans Claerhout, Alexander and Marianne Podlashuc, Reneé le Roux,...