The art world has spent the past year asking a quiet question: as African art commands more attention abroad, is it actually leaving the continent? The auction headlines suggest as much — global sales of African artists’ work have climbed even as on-continent trading has thinned. But auction results capture only part of the picture. To see where the work physically goes, you have to look at the customs data.
So we did. JLog pulled South Africa’s official trade figures for Chapter 97 — the customs classification covering original art, sculpture, prints and antiques — from the UN Comtrade database, the global standard for reported trade statistics. Here is what the numbers say.
South Africa is a net art exporter
Decisively so. In 2024 the country shipped roughly $62 million of genuine artworks — paintings, sculpture and original prints — against about $13 million imported from abroad. That is close to a five-to-one ratio. South Africa makes art the world buys, far more than it buys in.
Paintings lead at around $37 million, with sculpture close behind at $23 million — a reflection, in part, of the strength of South African sculptural practice internationally.
The work flows to the art-market capitals
The destinations are exactly the ones you would expect if you follow the global market. The United States took 26% of South Africa’s art exports in 2024 and the United Kingdom another 18% — nearly half the total between them. Add Switzerland, Belgium and Germany, and the top ten destinations account for fully 80% of what leaves the country. These are the world’s art-market capitals, and South African work is flowing straight into them.
The flow you don’t see
There is a second movement the headline numbers hide, and it is one we see constantly on the freight side. Roughly $37 million of art moves out of and back into South Africa each year — works returning from exhibitions, gallery stock coming home unsold, and pieces travelling on ATA Carnets for international fairs before returning. This is the invisible circulation of the art world: the same painting may cross a border four times before it sells. It rarely appears in market commentary, but it is a real and recurring part of how the trade works.
A market in recovery
The trajectory is one of recovery. Exports dropped sharply in 2020 — down roughly a third as the pandemic shut galleries and grounded freight — before climbing back. 2023 was a particularly strong year on the export side, and 2024 settled to around $62 million in genuine-art exports, comfortably above pre-pandemic levels for several categories.
What it means
For South African galleries, artists and collectors, the data confirms what many already sense: the centre of gravity for selling South African art increasingly sits abroad. That makes the mechanics of getting work across borders — customs classification, valuation, insurance, and the temporary-import rules that govern fairs — less of an afterthought and more of a core competency. The work is going global; the logistics need to keep pace.
About the figures. These come from UN Comtrade, reporting South Africa (reporter code 710) under HS Chapter 97. We use the genuine-art headings — 9701 (paintings), 9702 (prints) and 9703 (sculpture) — and deliberately exclude 9705 (collections), which for South Africa is dominated by natural-history specimens such as minerals and fossils rather than fine art. Export values are recorded free-on-board and imports cost-insurance-freight, in US dollars, per Comtrade convention. The full year-by-year breakdown, sources and methodology are on our data page: South Africa Art Trade Statistics.
Gerrit Dyman is the founder of JLog, the specialist art-logistics firm that serves as an appointed carrier for the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and freight partner to several of South Africa’s leading commercial galleries.