PRESS RELEASE
GERHARD MARX | Landscape would be the wrong word
Oct 14 – Nov 7, 2026
GERHARD MARX | Landscape would be the wrong word
14 October - 7 November
Meticulously constructed works at the intersection of cartography, botany and architecture.
COLLECTOR'S CATALOGUE | REQUEST PRICELIST | RSVP
For his first exhibition with Everard Read London, Gerhard Marx brings his engaging and meticulous cartographic reconstructions, and drawings made entirely from embedded plant material, to engage the visual languages used to depict, understand and engage the physical world.
Marx has a long history of working with maps: interrogating how they project authority and shape the way we see the world. By fragmenting and reassembling them, he opens new spatial possibilities and new ways in which they allow us to imagine the territories that they might describe, and how we might relate to those spaces.
His work with plant material refers to horticultural traditions, particularly the herbarium. By grafting and embedding plant fragments, he creates dense, tactile spaces that resist flat description, conjuring dimensional, layered, embedded places. “When I draw with plants, I am drawing the world with the world,” says Marx. “It is a turning – a moment in which the world folds in on itself to look at itself.” These drawings are literally ‘landscape drawings’, but without the distance and separation implied by that tradition. They are a type of landscape drawing, but drawn from within – drawn with the landscape.
“Landscape would be the wrong word” considers practices in which the world is rethought, reconsidered, and remade through the act of drawing and representation. The sketch, the model, the floor plan and blue-print, and the garden layout, all affect that which it describes, by describing it differently, by describing what it might become. Within this logic of ‘describing differently’, Marx explores alternative approaches to the tradition of depicting landscape, aiming to propose alternate spatial imaginaries as a way to affect not only how the world is represented, but also how it is related to.
Marx’s works are immediate and exciting. Precise and structured, they pulse with originality, energy and a sense of immediacy. They resist flat description, conjuring layered, immersive spaces charged with possibility. In pushing us to see and think differently, Marx reminds us why he is among the most compelling artists working in South Africa today.
