WINTER 25/26
JOHN MEYER, Hanging Glacier (Patagonia)
Mixed media on canvas, 160 x 230 cm
NIC BLADEN, Aloe congolensis
Bronze on crystal base, 76 x 20 x 20.5 cm
South African artist Nic Bladen is one of the world's finest botanical sculptors working today. Bladen strives to record the subtle and diverse biodiversity of his native Western Cape by creating unique bronze sculptures using the actual plant matter. Drawing on the ancient traditions of the lost wax method, Bladen has pioneered a new technique which has allowed him to render the finest organic details of his subjects.
This sculpture depicts the Aloe congolensis, native to the Congo and commonly known as 'Tiger tooth aloe'. If nurtured in its infancy and allowed to develop an established root system, this plant will flower with pink or red-orange flowers in late autumn to mid winter, atop an unbranched influroescence of 30cm or more.
NIC BLADEN, Rhombophyllum dalabriforme
Bronze on crystal base, 23 x 19.5 x 20 cm
South African artist Nic Bladen is one of the world's finest botanical sculptors working today. Bladen strives to record the subtle and diverse biodiversity of his native Western Cape by creating unique bronze sculptures using the actual plant matter. Drawing on the ancient traditions of the lost wax method, Bladen has pioneered a new technique which has allowed him to render the finest organic details of his subjects.
Rhombophyllum dolabriforme are low semi-shrub richly branching at their tips. Tufted when young the plants slowly grow out into densely branched, low mound up to 30 cm tall at maturity.
OLIVIA MUSGRAVE, Crossing the Night Sky
Bronze, 39 x 59 x 15 cm
Olivia Musgrave's work is drawn both from life and from the imagination where she draws inspiration from Greek mythology, as well as influences from 20th Century Italian sculptors, including Marini, Martini, Greco and Manzu
OLIVIA MUSGRAVE, Home from the Pasture
Bronze, 40 x 44.5 x 24 cm
Olivia Musgrave's sculptures are not a literal interpretation, she has instead tried to reveal the life and relationships between the men and women and their animals. As with many mythological stories these things are often intimately entwined, something which has
formed a large part of her work over the years.
BEEZY BAILEY, Love and Flowers for the Four Horses
Oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm
Beezy Bailey says he creates art “as a balm for a mad world – a corrective for our most lamentable human qualities, including a planet brutalized by extremes of wealth and poverty, environmental ignorance and negligence.” Many of his works emanate from his abiding concern with the Anthropocene, the present epoch characterized as the time in which the collective activities of Homo sapiens began to substantially alter the earth’s surface, atmosphere, oceans, and systems of ecological recycling.
BEEZY BAILEY, Spring Sprong
Oil on canvas, 120 x 90 cm
Often Beezy Bailey’s works are accompanied by poems, such as the 2016 ‘1000 Year Dance Cure’, in which he exhorts the world to dance a new dance, to abandon that which does not serve us, and to embrace each other in our humanity, and the earth in her service to us. The sources of his imagery are elusive. In his own words: “Frozen dreams, images and legends enter from my subconscious, the realm of my imagination. I act as a conduit for visual messages greater than I am.”
BRETT CHARLES SEILER, There Were Flowers Being Held Here
Oil on canvas, 130 x 167 cm
Showing for the first time at Everard Read London is Brett Seiler, following his successful exhibition with Everard Read Cape Town in early 2021. With his trademark use of roof paint and bitumen and hand-made wooden frames, Seiler ‘s work wrestles with notions of masculinity, home and loss. His work reads as a personal diary of sorts – intimate moments and memories of a life, seen here as scribbled notes and painted snapshots.
Contact: info@everardlondon.com
SHANY VAN DEN BERG, Dream garden
Oil on linen, 90 x 130 cm
Shany van den Berg has arranged grown gardens over the skin of painted figures which reference the reclining nudes of Delacroix. To capture a plant on canvas or in bronze is to stop time – to give it eternity. For Van den Berg, depicting plants is a matter of self-reflection. She is sharing the love, purity, passion, beauty, innocence, death and new life of the garden within.
BRETT CHARLES SEILER, Diver II
130 x 119.5 cm
MARK RAUTENBACH, 8:31:03 (Zazen Suite, Ad Hominem Series)
Mixed media, 128 x 88.5 cm
The title, Zazen, refers to a meditative discipline that is the primary practice of the Zen Buddhist tradition, a form of seated meditation that is believed to give insight into your true nature of being
“I love the idea that sewing thread, the material I work with, is a material that invisibly holds things together. The work nudges the viewer into becoming aware of how we make things up, we make up stories, we see things that aren’t actually there. That these stories invisibly hold our realities together.”- Mark Rautenbach
SHANY VAN DEN BERG, Embrace on a blue table
Oil on board, 60 x 40 cm
When I set about painting a floral still life, I don’t rely on a physical arrangement of flowers. The elements are conjured in my imagination and then I begin researching my fantasy flowers that quench my longing for nature, for joy and for a sense of freedom.
I think about war and insecurity that plagues our beautiful planet. I painted the pair of white poppies, embracing, as a symbol of the peace I yearn for.
- Shany van den Berg
LUCA EVANS, Man on train sneezes, whispers "bless me"
cotton rag canvas and house paint, 43.5 x 34.5 cm
Luca Evans currently work from a studio in Paarden Eiland, where they utilise a hit-and-miss experimental approach to carpentry and marquetry. Their pop-ish work plays with ideas around language, failure, mishap and humour. Text and object are assembled interchangeably. Luca’s practice employs a cut and paste approach. They work with marquetry, an archaic woodworking method in which thin pieces of wood are assembled like jigsaw puzzles. Although they work predominantly with wood, their practice is intercepted with moments of print, animation and painting.
SHANY VAN DEN BERG, Pink hibiscus in wavy vase
Oil on linen, 60 x 80 cm
My work draws on my responses to the traditions of still life and landscape painting as well as my personal memories as a child, gardening with my mother. It is also nourished by my enduring love for gardens and walking in nature.
- Shany van den Berg
SHANY VAN DEN BERG, We share this space
Oil on board, 30 x 30 cm
Shany van den Berg's paintings revel in the dialogue between the human form and the natural world.
I arrange flowers in vases and figures in gardens, with a similar eye for composition, exploring how the curve of a voluptuous vase echoes the sensuous curves of a human body. My intention is to create a sense of harmonious tension, where the cultivated and the wild, the temporary and the timeless, exist in a single, balanced frame. I think of my paintings as both a celebration of colour and form, but also a meditation on stillness and the ephemeral beauty to be found in the quiet, often-overlooked spaces between the domestic and the wild.
- Shany van den Berg
SHANY VAN DEN BERG, He made beautiful vases .... an ode I
Oil on linen, 60 x 40 cm
Shany van den Berg's floral still lifes are lush and vegetal and exemplify her profound connection to nature, womanhood and her place in the world. For the artist, motifs from the natural world centre on the cycles of changing seasons which are mirrored in family lines and individual lives. The curves and palette of her florals might take inspiration from the likes of Georgie O’Keefe, but they are largely the vibrant inventions of her imagination.
LEE-ANN HEATH, Under the Bloom
Oil on canvas, 150 x 80 cm
Lee-Ann Heath’s lush botanical paintings stem from her love of impasto and nature. Using her surroundings as a point of departure, Heath draws on inspiration both natural and relational. Heath’s goal is to recreate, analyse and deconstruct sensation.
When working with thick paint, the challenge of finding the balance between confident brush and palette knife strokes and moments of vulnerability, becomes integral to Heath’s process, with the continuous rearrangements of colours and forms lifting and enhancing each other, layer upon layer. The work reflects an obsessive urge to find the ‘right’ combination of colour, line and shape. As Heath explains: ‘I find the elements of surprise and unexpected accidental moments exciting, and when the accidental meets the intentional it often leads to the identity of the work coming into its own.’
Heath’s canvases have the distinctive mark of the artist’s hand; the thickly layered paint has been manipulated in a sensuous manner by her palms or fingers. This technique gives the images a three dimensional, almost culinary quality, the paint’s appearance reminiscent of icing on a cake – and almost good enough to eat. This invitation to an intense sensory interaction is carried through Heath’s practice, making her artworks textured, tactile and dynamic.
SHANY VAN DEN BERG, He made beautiful vases .... an ode II
Oil on linen, 60 x 40 cm
Shany van den Berg's floral still lifes are lush and vegetal and exemplify her profound connection to nature, womanhood and her place in the world. For the artist, motifs from the natural world centre on the cycles of changing seasons which are mirrored in family lines and individual lives. The curves and palette of her florals might take inspiration from the likes of Georgie O’Keefe, but they are largely the vibrant inventions of her imagination.
JEANNE HOFFMAN, Standing Against the Sky
Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 cm
Working across diverse mediums and far flung geographies, artist Jeanne Hoffman revels in the spaces between things.
The back and forth continues in the act of exhibiting – of reframing – how and where space opens: between individual pieces; between walls; between artist and viewer; between private and public. Individual and communal spaces become charged with relational meaning as yet unarticulated.
THONTON KABEYA, Rainy Day II
CHALK PAINT, WALNUT POWDER AND NEWSPAPER INK TRANSFER ON SCULPTED CANVAS, 78 x 63 cm
Through his art, Thonton Kabeya is searching for understanding and the answers to life's conundrums and, exploring the many layers that make humanity so rich. On one level, his work captures the essence of African cosmopolitanism. His figurative artworks are snapshots of moments and the ‘everydayness’ specific to a continent, and yet, they are still universally recognisable and relatable. Lovers dancing the Rumba, street scenes, young boys playing – life happens across Kabeya’s canvases. In comparison, his abstract pieces are deeply layered, built up and less obvious in their storytelling, but no less engaging and thought-provoking.
BRETT MURRAY, Boiled Frog
French red marble, 32 x 33 x 27 cm (12 1/2 x 13 x 10 5/8 in.)
This body of work traces its origins to the start of this decade and the artist’s experience of the global pandemic. It marks what writer, Noah Swinney, describes as “an idiomatic shift in Murray’s work from polemics to elegy; a transition from what the artist has called, an accusatory position to one that is more compassionate and empathetic.”
BRETT MURRAY, Protect
Carrara marble, 40 x 25.3 x 27.6 cm (15 5/8 x 10 x 10 3/4 in.)
Huddled together or clinging to one another, many of Murray’s sculptures convey a poignant tenderness and vulnerability. These symbols of the family unit - together, touching, protected, and protecting - strike a universal chord. While some works evoke pathos, others stoke unease and allude to an inherent violence. The hopeful is countered with gaping holes that speak to the loss and hurt that are an integral part of all human experience.
SHANY VAN DEN BERG, Curls and swirls in yellow vase
Oil on linen, 100 x 100 cm
Shany van den Berg has arranged the curves and colours of flowers in oil paint, with a nod to Georgie O’Keefe. To capture a plant on canvas or in bronze is to stop time – to give it eternity. For Van den Berg, depicting plants is a matter of self-reflection. She is sharing the love, purity, passion, beauty, innocence, death and new life of the garden within.
SHANY VAN DEN BERG, Between heaven and earth
Oil on linen, 130 x 90 cm
Shany van den Berg's nudes are lush and vegetal and exemplify her profound connection to nature, womanhood and her place in the world. For the artist, motifs from the natural world centre on the cycles of changing seasons which are mirrored in family lines and individual lives.
