Among the exceptional, singular and, yes, occasionally awful, artworks in the permanent collection of the South African National Gallery, one work stands out as truly enigmatic.

It is an untitled paper installation principally composed of repurposed cement packaging that Moshekwa Langa found on the streets of KwaMhlanga, the short-lived capital of the KwaNdebele homeland, shortly after finishing high school in 1993

This canonical work appears on the must-see exhibition surveying Langa’s category-resistant practice at A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town. Titled How to Make a Book, it declares its purpose — there is an in-depth publication on the artist in the works.

The works on show at A4 span the period 1995 to 2018. There are a half-dozen pieces from the 1990s, when Langa emerged — self-taught, fully formed and fax-enabled — on the local art scene. They include Dor, a speculative flag made for a 1998 exhibition in Rotterdam, Holland, as well as his untitled paper installation from 1995.

Three wires running obliquely across the central gallery of A4 display about 20 unbleached fragments of irregularly shaped paper that Langa recycled from discarded cement packaging.

“First you invent the country; then, if you can, an economy,” wrote American journalist Joseph Lelyveld in 1985 of KwaNdebele, a proxy state being built in a hurry. 

Read the full article here: https://mg.co.za/friday/2024-11-04-the-sculptures-where-nothing-is-true-and-everything-is-permitted/ 

The materia born from artistic landscapes, both present and past, is one of our greatest sources of admiration. ART THEMES is our irreverent tribute to the messaging that lies within these bodies of work. This bi-monthly digital review, curated according to thematic concepts, uses common interests and themes to collate the work of great artists – as we make unusual and intriguing connections across ambiguous and clarified perspectives, literal and figurative alike. 

Enter August’s theme: Hibernation. The sentiment of hibernation is aptly woven together by poet Chen Chen, who gives his take on the notion: “Yes– give yourself the time. To mull things over. Ruminate. To chew, yes. To hibernate, let things sit fallow. To follow intuitions. To study. To read, reread. To experiment wildly, experiment carefully. To care. To care about your mind, heart, belly and your every toe. To care about and for your language. To language your care.”

Each winter seems to have the profound ability to cause a ripple of introspection, to retreat into oneself, to take stock. It is both a physiological response to the change in natural surroundings, but also an emotional and psychological reaction. We are all affected instinctually, saving resources in various silos of our lives. Employing a hibernation tactic, mindset or practice feels unavoidable but is also nothing to deter from – each season has its glory. These artists represent some sort of coming inside, shielding, recovering, going within, cocooning towards what we hope is the warmth we seek, towards the betterment of self through hibernation.

 Read the full article here: https://ceconline.co.za/art-themes-theme-one-hibernation/ 

Cape Town-based ceramic artist Githan Coopoo is in the throes of art directing a fashion show for his friend and collaborator, the LVMH prize winning designer Sindiso Khumalo. He has much to say about the experience. “People like to think that Cape Town is beautiful because of the mountains and the landscape, but it’s what the land has been through that matters,” he exclaims, leaping from his seat to gesture towards the panorama.  

Read the full article here: https://www.ft.com/content/4fc684c4-93a7-4937-b918-32cab4b8d80d 

Groot Gat, the exhibition to mark Lady Skollie’s win as this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Arts, debuts in June 2023 at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, South Africa.

Lady Skollie discusses how in this body of work the hole or cave becomes a metaphor for tackling the complexity of Brown identities in South Africa. Groot Gat is on view in Makhanda until 2 July. The body of work will tour across the country – bringing powerful art and important ideas to diverse communities.

AMAKA speaks with the exhibitors and curators of the Tomorrows/Today section of the fair. 

The 10th edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF) will take place from the 17th - the 19th of February 2023 in the Mother City, which attracts history mixed with memory and desire.

Read the full article here: https://amaka.studio/explore/articles/investec-cape-town-art-fair

Visual artists across the globe, and specifically in Africa, have over the years reimagined their African identity, creating narratives that include all facets of life. Historically, sexuality, queerness, and gender expression were seen as 'un-African'. While it is still illegal to be LGBTQ+ in many African countries, there is a growing visibility of LGBTQ+ identities in the creative arts, pushing conversations that in the past were seen as taboo, but for self-taught jewellery designer and sculptor Githan Coopoo, he describes his art as obnoxious, queer and necessary.

Read the full article here: https://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/484/235446.html 

Summer holidays present lazy days by the pool. South African artists have been depicting this scene and others that offer an escape from reality. 

Read the full article here: https://editorial.latitudes.online/blog/posts/the-great-escape-can-art-offer-a-respite-from-reality/ 

ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE 2022 STANDARD BANK YOUNG ARTIST AWARD WINNERS

Receiving a Standard Bank Young Artist Award is a pinnacle point: this is one of the most prestigious prizes offered to South African artists under the age of 35. This year’s winners join the ranks of a stellar collective that have become household names over the last four decades. Standard Bank Young Artist Award winners are cherished as national treasures, and many have gone on to find new audiences on the African continent and achieve international acclaim.

Art from the private collection of late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen fetched over $1.6 billion this week to become the largest single-owner sale in auction history.

Works by Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Gustav Klimt all sold for over $100 million across a record-shattering two nights at Christie's in New York.

Spanning 500 years of art history, art from Allen's collection was offered on Wednesday and Thursday, with all proceeds going to philanthropic causes, the auction house said. Christie's had initially estimated that the 150-plus works would sell for a combined $1 billion, but the landmark sum was exceeded even before the conclusion of day one.

Read the full article here: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/paul-allen-collection-christies-auction-record/index.html 

Everard Read regrets to announce the passing of the eminent South African artist, Harold Voigt, born 1 May 1939 in Johannesburg.

Over a long and productive career, Voigt became one of the finest painters of this era. His searingly insightful renderings of the South African landscape and quiet interiors of his home and studio were collected internationally.
 
Everard Read was privileged to represent this thoughtful, elegant man from the mid-1970s. Many successful exhibitions attested to Voigt’s rise to the front rank of figurative painting in South Africa. “There simply hasn’t been a better painter wielding a brush during my era as a dealer,” says Mark Read. “Voigt’s painstaking accumulation of oil paint and glazes on canvas is technically on a par with the best of the old masters.”
 
Never a man to court fashion in contemporary art commentary, Voigt was nonetheless avidly sought after by collectors and institutions globally. He shall be profoundly missed. 
 
An exhibition celebrating this exceptional South African painter’s life will be presented in the coming months.

Celebrating female artists has become commonplace, yet the reality most women face remains difficult. How are artists dealing with disparity and violence against their gender?

Read the full article here: https://editorial.latitudes.online/blog/posts/can-and-should-female-artists-tackle-the-burden-of-inequality/ 

Teresa Kutala Firmino’s fantasy worlds are animated by a decidedly campy materiality. The fulsomely textured surfaces of her collages currently on view at Everard Read’s CIRCA Gallery in Johannesburg are brimming with buttons, stickers, glitter, feathers. Set against brightly polychromed backgrounds, masked female figures are resplendently clothed in fabrics drawn from digital prints—floral dresses, polka dotted bikinis, and geometric skirts. Others wear nothing but their frank nudity, sometimes accentuated by a glittery sheen. At first glance, these painting-collages strike us as Eden-like playgrounds of colorful femininity. But discreetly, they are also somewhat surreptitious elegies for the dead. 

Read the full article here: Teresa Kutala Firmino: The Owners of the Earth (Vissaquelo) – The Brooklyn Rail

Sue de Groot talks to one of SA’s most prolific and interesting artists, who is currently bowling over the English aristocracy with his dreamlike paintings and surreal sculptures

Read the full article here: https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/lifestyle/2022-05-15-lighting-the-knights-baileys-breeze-of-change-blows-north/ 

We are delighted to share with you the Dylan Lewis sculpture garden, as seen in the Telegraph Luxury magazine earlier this month.

The fashion story was photographed by South African Michael Love, and includes fashion by Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton, all modeled by Faith Johnson and Shubby Stanton.

View the full article and images here: https://dylanlewis.com/garden/publications/telegraph-luxury-magazine 

A new exhibition by Nandipha Mntambo features the artist’s first venture into furniture, on view at Cape Town’s Southern Guild until 8 April 2022

South African artist Nandipha Mntambo’s first venture into functional sculpture, now on view at Cape Town design gallery Southern Guild (until 8 April 2022), features four extraordinary Afropunk interpretations of classic seating. Alongside a shaggy stool inspired by traditional raffia costumes worn by West African village guardians, Mntambo has created a throne-like chair made from zebra hide, and crafted a eucalyptus-wood chaise longue featuring 60 hand-rolled leather tentacles.

Read the full article here: https://www.wallpaper.com/design/nandipha-mntambo-furniture-southern-guild 

There is much debate on the nature of the exhibition structure. Tensions between various models of presentation – solo vs. group, retrospective vs. showcase, etc. – inform the reputations of the institutions that perform them. Directly, or indirectly. Consciously, or unconsciously. The size and duration of any given exhibition is indicative of who may see and be seen, and under which conditions.

The strange swaying of the pandemic’s pendulum between ‘yes’ and ‘no’, and ‘online’ and ‘outside’ has disrupted the rhythms of these models, and brought into question their future formations. Even so, the distinct pleasure of entering a gallery space – just being there – remains one of the gifts I treasure in this life. Alternating deftly between the scale and scope of their presentations, CIRCA’s ongoing ‘Cubicle’ series platforms site-specific installations and “smaller bodies of artworks” for two weeks at a time. 

The Embassy of France in South Africa and The French Institute of South Africa are proud to support the Art for the Arch auction, as part of the Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation’s 90@90 campaign, which aims to raise R90-million for the Tutu Legacy Fund, from 7 October 2020 to 7 October 2022.

Funds raised from the Art for the Arch auction will go towards an exciting long-term exhibition celebrating the work of Archbishop Tutu, titled Truth to Power, which will open in October 2021. The Embassy is honoured to be part of this momentous occasion ꟷ both Desmond and Leah Tutu have continued to be outstanding examples of compassionate and courageous leadership, which is reflected in the Foundation’s work and continues to inspire many. 

John Meyer, West of Sutherland, acrylic on canvas, 76 by 94,5cm. Estimate R600 000 – 800 000

Read the full article here: https://mg.co.za/special-reports/2021-09-16-art-for-the-arch-celebrating-archbishop-tutus-90th-birthday-with-a-good-cause/ 

Makamo shuns exclusive gallery representation, opting instead for hybrid modes of trade. He is not averse to collaborations with commercial galleries. In March this year, he held a solo exhibition with Everard Read in Cape Town. The show featured examples of Makamo’s pop portraiture depicting young black subjects in the style of his celebrated 2019 Time magazine cover featuring his cousin, Mapule Maoto. The works offered at Everard Read were priced between R78,000 and R1.4 million. The exhibition drew “a broad and enthusiastic audience,” says Charles Shields, a co-owner and director of Everard Read. “Happily we pretty much sold out too.”

In distinction to Samson, the secondary market for works by Makamo in South Africa is robust. Aspire Art Auction has sold a dozen lots, while rival auction house Strauss & Co has shifted 99 lots. In July 2020, Makamo’s oil on canvas Portrait of a Girl Wearing Earrings sold at Strauss & Co for R455 200, a secondary-market record for the artist. The price is still a long way off the six figure sums commanded by Beauford Delaney, Ben Enwonwu and Gerard Sekoto, post-war painters whose practice links the current riotous innovation fuelling the art market to a long and venerable tradition of figurative description of Black lives by Black artists.

Read the full article here: https://cur8.art/art-news/never-mind-nfts-black-figurative-painting-is-the-style-du-jour-of-the-early-2020s/

A return to an ancient sense of connectivity and present-day existential exploration is brought to life – CHANT is currently on show until 28 May 2021 in Cape Town. Here, the internationally acclaimed, Faith XLVII, shares insights on work, the depth of her process and more.

Teresa Kutala Firmino, on the occassion of Manifestation Oku Yongola  | Manifestation of Wanting at Everard Read London, is interviewed by Bob Chaundy on an episode of the podcast Considering Art.

Click here to read the hear the full interview

Artists Teresa Kutala Firmino and Blessing Ngobeni draw on their personal experiences to create powerful political work.

Read the full article here: https://www.ft.com/content/65928d5d-b36d-40fa-a238-8156041cc70c 

For Brett Charles Seiler’s latest offering, Everard Read’s walls were painted black to host the frames and chalked afterthoughts, which along with the dimension-defining wooden sculptures, complete the collection that is ‘Timber’.

There’s a certainty to the introspective musings which hyphenate the works; they read like epiphanies, or tail-ends of conversations, or journal entries. These short stories such as, “after making love to a man he asked me if I believed in god” and “a homosexual with bad teeth” are part of what makes Seiler the dynamic artist he is. These intimate anecdotes seem both symptomatic of our symbiosis with social media, while feeling like a distinct, narrating voice emerging to guide the audience through the experience of the exhibition. More specifically, the experience of Seiler’s perspectives. From his bold linework, both in the ‘text’ and in the formation of his subjects, to his choice of canvas size and accompanying materials, to his use of space – Seiler is steadily extruding moments, and memories, and meanings to fulfil his vision as he enhances his style with each new work. ‘Timber’ is made up of building materials such as roof paint, bitumen, screws, and wood all accented by a familiar school-board shade of green to create room in which to ponder the institutionalisation of masculinity as you navigate Seiler’s themes and thinking.

Standing in front of any of Elize Vossgatter’s paintings, you feel your hand reaching out at once. The vast and intricate microcosm to be found in each valley and plateau draw you in even further. Suddenly, you find yourself so close that you start to merge with the painting.

Each carving motion reveals topographies wholly charged with layers of time. Sediments of our history as humans within this increasingly non-organic, non-natural, non-Earth divulge in every crevice of the painting’s surface. The deeper one peers into these valleys, the more monumental everything starts to feel.

Abstraction is a misnomer that assumes one is dealing with ideas and not things or events. It is all three – mindful, palpable, eventful. If abstraction has been divorced from the Real, this is because we’ve maintained a hoax that existence precedes essence – or vice versa, depending on one’s point of view – when in fact all of life, all art, fudges more commonly than it is parsed. The Real is an ideology, as is Abstraction. If the former now dominates – it has since Plato, who loathed artists – it is because now, most fervently, we ascribe to narrative, story, imputed-expected-received outcomes. Ours is a material age, an age of palpable Ideas, of people as representative of Ideas. It is no accident that we find ourselves avidly and blinkerdly preoccupied with indices such as race-age-gender-sexual persuasion, at the expense of all else that makes up a life. We subtract rather than abstract, shut out and shut in, the better to solidify what differentiates rather than connects us. Balkanised, separatist, we are fast abandoning the synthetic and synergetic power of abstraction.

We speak to Mark Read, chairman of the Everard Read group of galleries and also a passionate botanist and conservationist.

When poet and scholar Gabeba Baderoon was a graduate assistant at the University of Cape Town in 1988, there was a conference on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. As she looked at the programme, her gaze paused, fixing its attention on the cover image. It was something “meant to be glanced at briefly before one went into the substance of the programme”. But she looked intently, instead, and saw that it was a “picturesque image of an enslaved figure”, caught in a “play of visibility and invisibility”. 

‘To contaminate, to keep things intertwined in a transformative mutualism is to be sticky with the trouble on terra, now. How else does one envision these speculative futures, if not to look through and think with the earth, with every non-human thing and being in and on earth to create terra visions.’

What’s in a name? In the case of Io Makandal much that deserves our attention. Given the artist’s concern with the imbalance built into binary systems, be they technological, ecological, social, or political, her first name, Io – pronounced I/O – is a striking moniker. The definitions vary: input/output, industrial/organisational, instead of, in out, interoperability, insertion order, instrument operator (land surveying), idiot operator (as in an I/O error). Makandal delights in the acronym, then tells me that Io also Jupiter’s largest moon, the most volcanically active in our solar system. Makandal keeps all these readings in play, but what most compels the artist is how we absorb the imbalances within perceived order and alter an inherited Western Enlightenment project which has come to define the way we see and experience the world.

A couple of years ago, I was working as an assistant at a gallery. We were hosting a group show in which one of the works was to be a giant bird’s nest, sewn together out of hay from the artist’s farm, complete with several dozen handmade ceramic eggs. When the crated artwork arrived,we were somewhat irritated by its contents. The nest was dirty. It shed clumps of straw each time it was touched and left streaks of dirt on the floor and our clothes. Worst of all, though, were the bugs: muggies buzzing in our ears, fleas chowing our legs. After three days, our director had had enough. The nest was to be sent back, the eggs placed on a plinth like any normal sculpture. 

After a deluge, one of many in a sodden Cape Town winter, light pours through the studio window in Woodstock, Cape Town. The mountain and highway are blotted out, concrete buildings soaked, a turquoise blue garage-roof the only bright thing in a blur. On the windowsill a plate of rusty lemons, a pot plant, rusty too, though life still lingers green. On a wooden desk the stricken plant casts its shadow. Two lamps are angled about drying sunflowers in a sparkling blue vase, near ovoid, an upended eye. Lapis Lazuli. Madonna blue.

 Swain Hoogervorst, Deconstruction of a Vase of Flowers (3), 2020. Oil on Belgian linen, 40 x 30cm

In this painting of a vase of limp sunflowers, Hoogervorst has sketched the rudimentary coordinates and concordances that allow one to take hold of the world, see it. A line, fleck, squab of colour, runnel of paint, a shape, then another. Because nothing quite holds the eye, directs attention, looseness prevails. A sketch is not the beginning of something, it is everything, and nothing, or, nothing quite, because what binds the eye’s saccadic flickering grasp is the realisation that forms, shapes, the things we espy, take hold barely.  Forms quaver, things judder, a featureful yet featureless soup. Morphogenetic, things – paintings – self-organise. A feedback loop, the eye, brain, imagination, seeks structure inside the unpredictable, but what it cannot countenance, pull together, is the void. 

Acclaimed South African artist Lionel Smit takes Stellenbosch Visio editor France Beyers through his studio, sharing his inspirations and the creative process behind some of his most distinctive works. 

Known for his contemporary portraiture, large canvases and sculptures, Smit has carved out an international career through his distinctive art. Smit’s work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London and was selected as the ‘face’ of the BP Portrait Award. Over the past 10 years, he has established a substantial international following with collectors ranging from the Standard Chartered Bank to Laurence Graff Art Collection at Delaire Graff wine estate.

We meet the artist in his studio ahead of his exhibitions at Everard Read and the KUNST art fair in October 2020.

Johannesburg - Blessing Ngobeni uses art to express his opinion.

“It is the best way for me to influence or engage in global matters that affect me and the world I live in.”

His solo exhibition, “Chaotic Pleasure”, is now showing at the Standard Bank Gallery.

“Art enables me to narrate stories of the past, historical events that affect the present life of a black child. I am able to visualise the future life of the black child through art.”

Deborah Bell, one of South Africa’s most eminent and critically acclaimed artists, returns to London with an exhibition at Everard Read. Sentinels is a major exhibition of monumental sculptures and more than 30 new paintings created over the past two years. At the heart of the exhibition are eight towering, 2.5-metre-high sculptures, Sentinels (2020). Cast in bronze, their origins trace back to the series of nine sentinels the artist made in 2003.

Blessing Ngobeni and Teresa Kutala Firmino are the subject of an artist profile by Kerri von Geusau on Nataal.

Click here to read the full article

The Merriam Webster online dictionary defines Stockholm Syndrome as ‘the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with their captor.’ It is hard to make sense of the multiple problems we face in this fast-moving world, so we soldier on like we are addicted to the disorder. Blessing Ngobeni’s ‘Chaotic Pleasure’ invites us to pause and reflect on the complex issues of power and abuse. It is also an ideal critical response to the confusing, dramatic, and uncertain times we are caught up in. The exhibition includes large scale mixed media paintings, sculpture and drawings in the artist’s trademark animated form. The artist also incorporates fascinating coded inscriptions.  The work is featured in the inaugural virtual National Arts Festival (vNAF), itself a response to the outbreak of the novel COVID-19 pandemic. Ngobeni is the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art for 2020.

The work in this exhibition addresses many issues traversing from the intensely personal – A Thing Of The Past Haunts I-VI  finds Ngobeni reflecting on a troubled past in the countryside, and in the urban jungle that is Johannesburg – to the pressing forces of the everyday. Key national problems like the contentious land ownership issue, tribalism, and corruption that derails progress are not spared in this conceptually rich, raw, and uncompromising show. Ngobeni is a proud African who wants to see a united continent moving forward, embracing progress. This is seen through his damning critique of xenophobia and the genocides of the past. In Shopping For Black Skin I & II, the artist also problematizes conflicts fueled by the outside world bent on stealing the continent’s resources amidst the chaos they create in cahoots with greedy African puppet leaders.

To read more, follow the link to full review here: https://artthrob.co.za/2020/07/06/coded-inscriptions-blessing-ngobenis-chaotic-pleasure/  

Every week, we explore the thousands of galleries on the Artnet Gallery Network to highlight the spaces and artworks inspiring us right now. Take a look at our latest picks.

Link to full article here: https://news.artnet.com/partner-content/artnet-gallery-weekly-favorites-may-14

We've long admired the work of Philip Barlow, the South African artist who tricks us with his incredible oil paintings that look like "bokeh" effect photographs. You know, when the lens is out-of-focus to deliberately create appealing blurred lights.

His latest series, which is due to go on show at Galerie LeRoyer in Montréal this summer, continues to look at some of our favourite street scenes from cities around the world, New York City being a running theme.

Link to full article here: https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/philip-barlow/

If you have passed through some of Johannesburg’s more bustling reaches recently, you may have spotted a statement, or an invitation, written on the walls in tall, block letters: ‘CHANT. CHANT. CHANT’.

The words were painted by interdisciplinary artist Faith XLVII on one of her recent trips to the city, and form part of a broader body of work the artist is moving towards – one that seeks to both highlight the daily din of the contemporary world, and carve out pockets of quiet reflexivity among it all.

Read the full article here: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-04-22-chant-faith-xlviis-public-practice/

Julian Navarro has a keen eye for spotting talent. As director of Art Miami — celebrating its 30th anniversary this week — as well as its sister shows Context in Miami and New York, the curator and cultural entrepreneur has his finger on the pulse of all that’s new and notable. He sees Miami’s Art Week as “a good platform to see fresh work” and loves that “a lot of artists spend all year producing exciting pieces” for it. Here, he shares with Alexa his picks for on-the-rise names to be on the lookout for.

Link to full article here: https://nypost.com/2019/12/03/6-rising-art-stars-to-catch-in-miami-this-week/

Congratulations to Blessing Ngobeni for winning the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Arts in 2020. 

This year marks 36 years of Standard Bank’s sponsorship of the SBYAA and sees each winning young artist receiving a cash incentive, as well as a commission to premiere a new work or exhibit on the Main Programme of the 46th National Arts Festival, taking place in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) from 25 June to 5 July 2020. 

Stepping up towards Liza Grobler’s studio, my eyes roam quickly up and over my surroundings as I ascend, the morning sun already making its way to the top of the stairwell where she’s smiling at me from, bursts of colour peaking at me through the frame of her glasses. I made a mental note of the high ceilings as I set up my notebook and my phone to record. Her studio is spacious, and busy. There are twists of fabric knotted together, hanging here and there, and the wooden floors are marked with splashes of paint and painter’s footfalls.

Liza describes the process of bringing ‘A Rainbow in my Pocket’ – her new exhibition at Everard Read –  as somewhat back-to-front. Neither the concept nor the name came first, she insists, but rather an emphasis on what lays at the nexus of creativity; the actual undertaking. “My work is more driven by process, and action, and mark-making,” she explains with rolling, wide hand gestures; the same way she likes to paint, it turns out, “A lot of my other work is site-specific. It always has a performative component, but usually in a more understated way.” Evidence of Liza’s mark-making stretches from A Portal Into Monet – Greenpoint Park (Diptych) yet in slower circles than it does in Broadway Bellies, both of which are particularly captivating.

Both Turiya Magadlela & nomThunzi Mashalaba were invited to exhibit in Speculative Inquiry #1, the first exhibition focusing solely on living women abstract artists in Africa. Taking place at the Michaelis Galleries from 8-24 August, this exhibition is a speculative inquiry that considers the contributions of living black women artists and the potential their practices and work stand to contribute to studies on abstraction. Curated by Nkule Mabaso.

Turiya Magadlela has also been featured in Phaidon's recent publication Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art. 
This publication celebrates tapestry, embroidery, stitching, textiles, knitting, and knotting as used by visual artists worldwide. Vitamin T is the latest in the celebrated 'Vitamin' series in which leading curators, critics, and art professionals nominate living artists for inclusion. As boundaries between art and craft have blurred, artists have increasingly embraced these materials and methods, with the resulting works being coveted by collectors and exhibited in museums worldwide. If you would like to purchase this publication click here. 

Date: 8 - 17 June

Time: 09:00 - 17:00

Venue: FynArts Gallery 

In this exhibition Phillemon Hlungwani returns to the etching press which is his first love and whose arcane and ancient skills he has mastered. He also reprises a theme which is seminal to understanding who he is as a person and as an artist.

Raised in a rural African village by a mother widowed young, he grew up watching women work so that they and their families would survive. The unrelenting labour of women is a reality but to Hlungwani it is what nurtured his body and his talents, and he sees in it both love and redemption in their purest sense.

His complex and technically brilliant etchings take everyday subjects and make them clear to us (like purifying murky water) and in some of them he makes delicate use of hand colouring, thus emphasising the femininity of his subjects. These works have been made with the assistance of master printer Pontsho Sikhosana and her team at the Artist Proof Studio.

Exhibition presented in association within Knysna Fine Art and Everard Read Gallery.

The exhibition will be opened by Trent Read on Saturday 8 June at 14:00

Times of walkabouts to be announced.

For more infomation visit: www.hermanusfynarts.co.za

When Brett Murray, a standout even in a particularly bright lineup of star art students, won the grand Michaelis prize in his graduate year, 1983, his aesthetic route was defined: the court jester with the finest of touches; social consciousness to be articulated in the high precision of the artful object.

His master of fine arts a few years later was a riveting triumph, and the chunky cartoon characters to tread his career stage entered in all their metaphorical glory.

One of those, King — a delicious Ubu, rich of ridicule — is coming up for auction on February 16 at Strauss & Co’s contemporary art sale during the weekend’s Cape Town Art Fair. It’s a vivid marker.

Read the full review here

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that South African art’s newest superstar, the 36-year-old Limpopo-born Nelson Makamo, made it to the cover of Time magazine this week. That’s because one of Makamo’s biggest fans is Ava DuVernay, the acclaimed US film director, producer and distributor. And DuVernay was the guest editor of the latest edition of the mag, called “the optimism edition”. She’s posted on her Instagram before about buying paintings from Makamo.

Auction houses show his larger work climbing rapidly above the R250 000 mark but the verdict is out on the value of the gorgeous work featuring a child in red spectacles now that it’s been on the cover of Time. And she’s not the only celeb in love with his bright paintings and famous charcoal portraits, which exude the love and beauty of the innocent African child, marking an upbeat and positive trend in the often dark and conceptual world of contemporary art.

Read the full article here

‘Somehow the orchid fraternity got hold of me,’ smiles sculptor Nic Bladen. It may sound like a plot twist in a floral conspiracy novel, but this was perhaps the turning point in his career. While making a living creating jewellery, he was asked by the president of the local orchid society to cast a few whole orchids in bronze.

A former dental technician, Bladen learned about bronze sculpture under the watchful eye of Otto du Plessis at Bronze Age before going out on his own. He’d been loping along when the orchid request came. ‘I cast a flower one day and that was it. Lightbulb moment.’

Read the full article here

Barbara Wildenboer delicately cuts and extracts the pages of old books to produce sculptural explorations of the contents inside. Thinly sliced paper fragments frame world maps found in old atlases or appear like a nervous system in an altered copy of Functional Neuroanatomy. The works are part of an ongoing project titled the Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginable Large, to which she has been contributing altered books since 2011. The series uses the site of the library as a metaphor for the larger universe, while also focusing on the decrease of printed materials as a result of the digital age.

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Recognized as the World Design Capital in 2014, the art and design scene in Cape Town is flourishing. There are big museums (Zeitz MOCAA) and small galleries (Southern Guild); old ones (Everard Read) and new ones (SMITH Studio). But in Cape Town, it’s not all about the art. The city has a number of unmissable historic and cultural museums that showcase the country’s deep and complex cultural history—from sites such as Nelson Mandela’s former cell to a less-expected museum that showcases the country’s Jewish heritage. Here, our picks of Cape Town's best museums to help you experience a bit of it all.

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Angus Taylor and Rina Stutzer are a force in the South African art world. Not only are they both respected artists in their own right, they also run one of S A’s most advanced sculpture studios and foundries, Dionysus Sculpture Works (DSW), which casts many of our most renowned local fine artists, including Deborah Bell, Joni Brenner and Norman Catherine.

Angus has created some of SA’s most recognisable large sculptures, often combining materials such as bronze, steel and stone, although he also works with more ephemeral materials like rammed earth and packed thatching grass. H is stacked stones in the form of reclining giants evoke some of man’s most ancient interactions with Earth. Angus is probably still associated foremost with his figural work — usual ly male figures, hard to define when it comes to age or race — that engage profoundly with the tension between permanence and the transitory nature of human life. At first glance they might even appear to be made after quite a traditional idiom, but he has always subverted any notion of the monumental bronze statue by putting them in the context of ancient and, beyond that, geological timescales embodied in varieties of carefully selected stone.

Rina ’s role at DSW involves c reative input and implementing core changes on various projects, as well as work on her own large-scale public sculptural works. But she is perhaps best known as a painter. As a counterpoint to the fire, noise, h eat and primal energy at DSW, Angus and Rina ’s studio at home represents a more private, reflective space where a sense of tranquillity and connection to nature allows ideas to germinate. Their home studio is an extension of their house just outside Pretoria, designed for them by local architect Pieter Mathews (Mathews & Associates Architects) and built by Angus. The house is almost a sculpture itself, clad in granite offcuts from one of the stonemasons Angus works with. In fact, Pieter said he drew inspiration from Angus ’s sculptural works, incorporating materials that are bold, raw and honest, so that his plan and Angus’s interventions.

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As soon as Arabella Caccia explains where her art comes from, and having seen her work, it all makes sense to me. It just seems to fit perfectly. Looking at her work evokes a wave of emotion, much like the actual waves that you might spot woven into her work multi-layered work. Born in London to an Italian father and a South African mother, Caccia grew up in Tuscany, central Italy, and lived her teenage years in Johannesburg. After spending time in SA’s biggest city, she found herself living and studying in some of the biggest international cities – New York, London and Florence. She now has four daughters – of whom none went into the world of art. Caccia laughs at this fact, saying that they have definitely seen enough of that “crazy” world and decided it wasn’t for them. The origin of her newest exhibition, Without Words – which was hosted at Everard Read in the Boland town of Franschhoek – consists of work she had previously done on baobab trees in Botswana. She visited the Southern African country to do a series of drawings on their indigenous giant baobab trees. One day, she was lying in a hammock strung from one of the trees, when she noticed the texture of the tree’s bark and all the intricate patterns that it created. She became captivated with those delicate patterns and started sketching. She even made silicone casts to make multiplemprints with. This was where it all started.

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“It does not take a whole lot of convincing to get someone on a plane,” is the droll answer of Joost Bosland, curator at Stevenson, one of Cape Town’s leading commercial art galleries, when asked about the spectacular growth of the city’s art scene.
It’s not hard to see what he’s on about. Cape Town has natural beauty in spades: towering cliffs, golden beaches, and historic vineyards that produce seriously good wines. The city’s centre, wedged between the soaring sandstone of Table Mountain and the glittering Atlantic, is compact and safe enough to explore on foot – a mix of art deco, modernist and Victorian buildings home to restaurants, design shops and entrepreneurs.
And then there are the galleries. You’ll encounter many of these on an amble through the centre, or by heading to Woodstock, a gritty, vibrant nearby suburb, where many of the city’s top commercial spaces are based. “The visual arts sector in South Africa is technically as good as anywhere else. The subject matter is universal. Often examples are very affordable relative to elsewhere,” says Charles Shields, the director of Everard Read Cape Town. The gallery, which has been based in the v&a Waterfront for the past 22 years and recently opened a new satellite space, Circa, sells roughly half of its works to international collectors...

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‘Preoccupations’ is a word which arises repeatedly in descriptions of Blessing Ngobeni’s work and throughout the gallery text accompanying his exhibitions. In ‘Enemy of Foe’ –  the artist’s latest exhibition at CIRCA Cape Town – Ngobeni’s preoccupation take the form of a diligent study of political societal decay. A proper viewing of this body of work reflects a near textbook-like study, not just of one particular political structure, but a collection of flawed political strategies; a survey of past and present structures which are presented to us as detailed cross-section diagrams.

This scrutiny gets going straight from the Vinyl Text. ‘Enemy of Foe’ has a correlation with the expression ‘An Enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Through the use of this simple phrase our minds race to recall soured relations caused by succession battles for the South African presidency and similar happenings around the position of Cape Town mayor.

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The internationally renowned sculptor Angus Taylor is the 2017 winner of the Helgaard Steyn Award, one of the most substantial prizes within the South African arts scene dedicated to the promotion of art and culture in South Africa. The award is made in a quadrennial cycle for best performance in literature, musical composition, painting and sculptural works. This year the Award is for approximately R575 000 and any South African born artist is eligible to enter. The prize is awarded for a work of art, in the opinion of the adjudicators, to be the most meritorious in the discipline, provided it was produced in the past four years and that the work is accessible to the South African public.

The fire that destroyed Shany van den Berg’s home haunts her exhibition, (In)filtration of Time, but it is not immediately apparent.

It is a biographical tidbit that offers a deeper reading of this intriguing exhibition concerned with the evolution of the female identity and existential questions about the passing of time and what it is to be alive.

It is hard to think why these two themes shouldn’t be interlinked. Perhaps we are programmed to believe that any dialogue about the female body has to do with appearances and not deeper universal issues that also pertain to men.

Yet the exhibition is a deeply feminist one. The link between clothing and the female identity lingers. The works in the entrance of the cavernous Circa gallery in Cape Town pivot on silhouettes of ideal-looking female bodies, which are cut out from a coarse linen and allude to pattern pieces of garments or mock traditional couture.

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Barbara Wildenboer’s second exhibition with Everard Read/CIRCA Cape Town, is dedicated to the invisible hand that guides nature, and the human hand that attempts to interpret it. At its heart, The Invisible Gardener is also a celebration of collage at luxurious scales. A microscopic image is scaled upwards, downwards and reintroduced into a variety of media whilst exploring a number of subject matters. Collages are photographed, cut up and collaged again, re-absorbed into Wildenboer’s visual language.

‘Searching Eudaimonia,’ Swain Hoogervorst’s first solo exhibition with Everard Read, hangs in an even horizon line on charcoal-coloured walls. The dark backdrop and incandescent track-lighting activate the procession of canvases, illuminating splashes of oleander pinks, succulent viridians and ashy greys; a bright panorama of painterly sketches.

Without a doubt, the maiden voyage for AKAA (Also Known As Africa) was a rousing success and Nataal enjoyed the ride. The international art fair devoted to contemporary art and design from Africa attracted 15,000 visitors to Carreau du Temple in Paris last week to enjoy works by over 100 artists plus insightful performances and debates. “AKAA paves the way for a meeting place where the actors of the contemporary art market from Africa come together to exchange dialogue and share with spontaneity,” says founder and director Victoria Mann.

http://www.wantedonline.co.za/wanted-magazine/

Thirty-one-year-old Beth Diane Armstrong is regarded as a leading sculptor of her generation. For the last number of years, she has worked predominantly on monumental artworks made of mild and stainless steel. Multimedia artist Dineo Seshee Bopape (35) uses experimental video montages, sound, found objects, photographs and sculptural installations in her work which has been shown in the US, the Netherlands and the 12th Biennale de Lyon.

Watch a video about the artist here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6_kUseTPrE&feature=youtu.be

Bronze sculpture is at home in the grounds and interiors of great houses — and for good reason. The grandeur of this lustrous dark matter lies in its use for works of world art spanning 3,500 years. The earliest known bronze sculpture is the tiny Mohenjo-Daro figurine from the Indus valley, created well before Greek Zeus figures, Chinese crucibles, Inca cogged discs or Landseer’s lions in London’s Trafalgar Square.

Matthew Hindley has extended his series of paintings, entitled 'Resurrection' exhibited at Everard Read in Cape Town last year with its focus on fire and destruction in a new body of work and has developed a slightly different stylistic methodology. His most recent body of work, 'Ruin Lust' at Everard Read in Johannesburg explores the fascination, even aesthetic beauty, associated with violence, explosions, and bomb blasts. In conversation with the artist, what became evident is that in his steering away from the merely 'pretty,' the artist wishes the viewer (and he himself) to confront the shadow side; that a recognition of one's lust for violence and chaos may in fact be cathartic. Tragedy in art may ironically lead to healthier or more profound living.

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http://artsouthafrica.com/220-news-articles-2013/2809-ruin-lust-matthew-hindley-at-everard-read-johannesburg-by-danny-shorkend.html

C’est une culture, un peuple et ses

légendes que Thania Petersen aborde dans

un travail de mise en scène aux frontières

du kitsch. Prenant la pose en

costume dans des décors décalés, l’artiste

sud-africaine évoque son histoire

personnelle et celle de sa communauté,

issue d’esclaves malais et indonésiens.

Quanta Gauld of Art Throb reviews Everard Read CT's April group show, Pastoral Abstraction.

“all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime” (Diderot).

The above quote serves as the opening line for the exhibition guide for  ‘Pastoral Abstraction’. The title immediately harks back to an art historical understanding of the pastoral, a genre of 19th century landscape painting that glorified human dominion over and cultivation of the natural environment. This reference provides a crucial starting point to consider the works on show. Drawing on the concept of the sublime, ‘Pastoral Abstraction’ is a contemporary effort to visualise the place of humans in nature in the context of the current historical moment.

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Centro Luigi Di Sarro, Rome and Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town are pleased to announce that the South African artist selected for the 2016/2017 Edition of ARP- Art Residency Project - is Zwelethu Machepha.

Financed by MAECI, Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, and have the patronage of the Italian Embassy in South Africa and the South African Embassy in Italy, the residency will take place in Rome starting the 3rd of May, 2016, after which the artist will have a solo exhibition, at Centro Di Sarro, opening on May 31st 2016. The exhibition and the residency will conclude on 11 June and 13 June 2016, respectively.

Gallery Artist Shany Van den Berg's Self, 21x30cm, 2016 is one of 50 finalists in this years BP Portrait Awards 2016 at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Tim Liebbrant reviews Nigel Mullin's Retrogressive Propaganda exhibition in the Sunday Argus.

"Seen from a distance, his subject matter is easily recognisable as archival photographs of mostly femaile figures. As one moves closer, what was previously a faithful recreation melts into an indecipherable mishmash of dense impasto paint bursting from its frame.''

With just over a week to go until the opening of CIRCA Gallery in London on March 17th, director Georgie Shields speaks to Siobhan Keam of Art Africa about the new Chelsea gallery.

"...given an appropriate platform, artists from Southern Africa do as well as artists from anywhere else in the world.''

Read more in the March issue of ART AFRICA

Everard Read artist Thania Petersen was featured on the front page of The Next 48 Hours newspaper. Petersen's striking photograph, Queen Colonaaier and her Weapons of Mass Destruction, adorned the front page article detailing the Cape Town Art Fair's Special Project Space, Tomorrows / Today.

Petersen, who describes her work as quite theatrical in style, gives a voice to her community – Indonesian descendants living in South Africa. She will be showing a video titled ‘Baqa’ alongside her ‘Rampies’ installation. Together the two engage the senses and speak of the Cape Malay people’s spiritual rituals. She will also be presenting a second body of work called ‘Botanical Imperialism’, comprised of two photographs highlighting the impact of colonialism both on the natural environment and Petersen’s people.

Read the full article here: http://48hours.co.za/cape-town-art-fair-to-serve-as-showcase-for-tomorrows-artists/

The 4th edition of the Cape Town Art Fair will be showcased at the CTICC from Friday to Sunday. Lucinda Jolly previews. 

Matthew Partridge, the recently elected director of the Cape Town Art Fair says that ''his primary mission is to generate three primary conversations. Firstly, while he believes that the SA art market was consolidated at the Joburg Art Fair seven or eight years ago, he wants to “recenter” Cape Town within the SA art world. Secondly, he wants the fair to engage with neighbours on the African continent by including galleries from Cameroon, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Senegal. Thirdly, dialogue with Europe via galleries from Italy, Germany, France, Belgian and the UK reconfiguring Africa’s place – especially given that contemporary African art is so hot right now. This year’s Amory Show which opens a week after the CTAF has an African focus.''

Read the full story here: http://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/visual-splash-at-weekend-art-fair-1984825

"A variety of emotions and personal experiences will all be translated into art as part of the Tomorrows/Today special project taking centre stage at the Cape Town Art Fair. Featuring a rich array of mediums the special project will give art enthusiasts, investors and collectors the opportunity to experience the works of eight emerging artists from around the continent. 

The special project aims to open up ideas about consumption by considering the ways in which tomorrow’s artists should not be pinned down by today’s ideas. It contemplates the ways in which human beings are consumed by so many aspects of life.''

Read the full article here: http://elledecoration.co.za/66324-2/

Mary Corrigall interviews Wayne Barker for the Mail & Guardian.

"'The renowned South African artist has turned to silkscreening for his latest exhibition but his trademark touches remain.''

Times LIVE interviews Wayne Barker about his solo show The World that Changed the Image in Johannesburg. 

Everard Read Artist Deborah Bell was featured in VIEWS: The Journal of Delaire Graff Estate. 

A trasncendant scultpuror, painter and print maker, Deborah Bell is one of South Africa's most celebrated artists. Bell is renowned for producing highly mystical and personal works in a variety of mediums.

Art Throb reviews @Play, a five person multi disciplinary exhibition at the Cape Town gallery. Opening on the 12^th November 18:30pm, it will run until the 30^th November 2015.

"It is appropriate that the @play group-show at Everard Read prompts child-like exclamations of ‘that’s so cool.’ While all the artists have different styles, they converge on the task of  ‘experimentation and the processes of physical mark-making’ without restraint.  Ranging from deconstructed pianos to dogs crafted out of carbon fiber, this show is entirely too caffeinated to called a meditation on medium."

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The London dealer John Martin has partnered with Everard Read gallery from South Africa to launch Circa London in the Chelsea space Martin acquired last year. The new gallery is due to open fully in mid-March after renovations are complete, but the front part of the building opened earlier this week with a rotating display of contemporary works from South Africa and Europe.

Read the full story here: http://artthrob.co.za/2015/11/15/circa-gallery-london-opens/

Ashraf Jamal interviews Charles Shields, director and co-owner of Everard Read Gallery in Cape Town, on the upcoming opening of Circa London in March 2016. The move promises to hold many exciting developments both for the gallery’s represented artists, as well as for the international arts community which is in many ways centered within this international hub. Art Africa on 28 October 2015.

IN THE Medici of Jozi Jillian Carman recounts the story of SA’s oldest commercial gallery, Everard Read, which has not only "weathered the vagaries of artistic and economic trends" but stands, through its numerous satellite shopfronts over a century, as "a testament to an extraordinary family possessed of business and artistic acumen".  Read Article here