Everard Read Cape Town recently celebrated 50 years of representing esteemed South African landscape painter, John Meyer with a solo exhibition, A Remarkable Journey. The show demonstrated Meyer's prowess as both a landscape painter and portraitist.  

John Meyer's landscapes have defined the genre in South Africa for decades. He has captured the beauty of South Africa with careful realism, immortalising its dusty tracks and arid vastness. Anyone who has spent time with John Meyer’s work finds it challenging to immerse oneself in the haunting beauty of the Karoo, the Hex River in autumn, or a waterlily-clad wetland in KwaZulu Natal without remarking that John Meyer must have passed there before. Such is the power of a truly profound landscape painter.

Meyer has also established himself as one of the premier portraitists of his era. This fascination with people and the subtlety of human inter-relationships demanded that people insinuated themselves increasingly into his art over the decades. His extraordinary facility with painting the human form has evolved inexorably from formal portraiture into a series of fascinating paintings of people – people at play, under duress and in love.

“We at Everard Read are so proud to host this exhibition. John’s work has been one of the defining aspects of the gallery for fifty years. A very rare relationship for the artist and all of us who work with him. This will be a long-remembered exhibition.”

            – Mark Read

 Read more about his exhibition in Cape Town here

John Meyer (b. 1942, South Africa)

John Meyer is considered one of South Africa’s foremost realist painters. Meyer completed his studies at the Johannesburg Technical College’s School of Art before taking up employment within the advertising industry and later working as an illustrator in London. In the 1970s, Meyer returned to South Africa and made the decision to pursue a career in art. He has been exhibiting with Everard Read gallery since 1975.

Meyer’s oeuvre predominantly comprises landscapes, genre paintings and portraits. Some of his most significant series of works include Mandela, A Life’s Journey; Elizabeth, A Sovereign’s Journey and Lost in the Dust, a body of depicting scenes relating to the Anglo Boer War. While the artist is committed to creating representational works, the scenes he depicts are imagined as opposed to being recordings of specific scenes and events. With his almost photo-realistic imagery, Meyer brings to the fore the complexities of visual perception, interpretation, and the subjectivity of the viewer.

Discover John Meyer's works at Everard Read London here