The Artist List

These texts accompanied singular works by each of our represented artists on The Artist List, a group exhibition at Stevenson in Cape Town from 2 December 2023 to 20 January 2024, marking twenty years of the gallery’s existence.

JANE ALEXANDER

The relationship between Jane Alexander and the gallery goes back to the mid-1990s. At that time she and her family were living on Long Street in Cape Town’s city centre, and visits between Jane and Michael Stevenson often took place on the balcony which was also her studio.

In 1995 Jane Alexander was the recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, and the FNB Vita Art Now prize followed a year later. She received the Daimler Chrysler Award for South African Sculpture in 2002, the Mbokodo Award for Sculpture in 2014, and the Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust’s Extraordinary Award for Sculpture in South Africa in 2020.

All awards carry complexities, perhaps even more so in the case of an artist who has always maintained a deep ambivalence for the entwining of the creative process with the determinations of the art market. We have always had deep admiration and respect for this sustained and independent mode of making, existing as it does at some distance from the formal art market.

Since 2010 Jane Alexander’s work has regularly been included in our curated shows, as well as two-person exhibitions – with Glenn Ligon in Johannesburg in 2016 and with Shine Shivan in Cape Town in 2022. In 2014 we presented Survey: Cape of Good Hope (2005–9) and Infantry with beast (2008–10) at our gallery in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, with Verity, Faith and Justice showing in Amsterdam in 2021. A notable highlight of our relationship was the placement of African Adventure (1999–2002) in the permanent collection of Tate Modern, London, in 2016.

Jane Alexander joined the artist list in 2023.

Cian-Yu Bai’s painting Strangers is from The Ice in Your Eyes, her first solo exhibition with the gallery in Amsterdam in April/May 2023. Bai had moved from Taiwan to Amsterdam in 2012 to take up a two-year residency at De Ateliers. Soon after, she was awarded the Buning Brongers Prize and the Public Prize of the Royal Award for Modern Painting. She received the main prize of the Royal Award for Modern Painting in 2019, and a year later Viviane Sassen saw the work while serving on a jury and introduced it to the gallery. Much to our surprise Bai did not have international gallery representation, and we quickly started doing studio visits and developing a professional relationship.

Cian-Yu first exhibited with the gallery in late 2021 as part of Works on Paper in Cape Town, and her debut solo presentation took place there a few months later, following a residency in the city. She painted in a studio in Woodstock, watching as a floral winter turned to spring and adapting her colour palette to her new environment to create The Breath in the Mind. After this, having mostly stayed in Amsterdam for 10 years, Cian-Yu started travelling again, enjoying the change of pace and following her work to the gallery booth at Frieze London. In December 2022 she took a journey through Iceland, which led to her series The Ice in Your Eyes, where the contrasts in the natural elements of fire and ice became metaphors for her articulation of the human experience.

Cian-Yu’s work often encompasses themes that refer directly to her childhood experiences of finding herself flocked and surrounded by a swarm of butterflies or approached by koi fish, her marks vibrating with impressionistic qualities that oscillate between abstract and figurative realms. Although her work features mostly natural elements and creatures, set in almost idyllic harmony, she uses acrylic paint as a medium to ‘create an illusion’ – to replicate the appearance of watercolour – and her work prompts larger questions around perception. She states, ‘I want to show people that sometimes what they see is not the truth.’

EXHIBITED Strangers, 2023

Acrylic on linen

ZANDER BLOM

It was Wim Botha, living in Johannesburg at that time, who first drew our attention to University of Pretoria information design drop-out Zander Blom. At Wim’s insistence we went to see his exhibition The Drain of Progress at the then-new, now-defunct Rooke Gallery in Newtown. Blom’s photographs of debris floating in the corners of his Brixton house, and the accompanying book, immediately registered as something special. In 2007, a conversation about abstraction and South Africa’s relationship to modernism had yet to be had in earnest. Identity and other concerns of politics dominated the discourse in the aftermath of 1994 – formalism, and art for art’s sake, were notions heavily tainted by the ideology of government-sanctioned art in the 1980s. Today, it is hard to convey just how radical Zander’s work felt at that moment in that place. The Rooke show also stood out because Zander himself stood out: here was a 25-year-old artist presenting a coherent, ambitious project with a confidence and pomp that belied his age. An obsessive attention to detail, along with a sincere interest in how his ideas and work are packaged, gave The Drain of Progress project a gravitas that few young artists are able to manifest, and meeting him only affirmed our instincts. What followed is an anecdote we have repeated so often that it has started to feel apocryphal, but it really happened: after contributing two works to Disguise, the opening exhibition of our Woodstock space, it would be another two years before Zander agreed to a solo show with us. When he finally assented, we were confused and worried when a large invoice arrived for Belgian linen. We had only ever seen Zander’s photographs, and had no idea if he could paint. Yet we had little choice but to trust the process, and subsequent studio visits took away our initial discomfort. Eleven solo shows with the gallery later, most people will think of Zander as a painter, and many might not even know about his early photography. That abstraction no longer feels transgressive is a testament to the impact Zander and a handful of his peers have had on the local discourse, and on the way we look.

In early 2003, with the gallery’s opening looming, Michael Stevenson and Andrew da Conceicao headed to the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival in Oudtshoorn, which at the time offered some of the most cutting-edge contemporary art in the country. Wim Botha was the festival artist, and his room-like installation, commune: onomatopoeia, was unlike anything they had seen before. The work – which evoked a middle-class white South African interior using suspended, simulated ‘found objects’ – felt revolutionary in its metaphoric nature, amid so much that was literal and overt. The virtuosity of Wim’s carving impressed as much as his use of materials, from wood and paper to fluorescent light and dripping water, to perform what Liese van der Watt, in his 2006 Standard Bank Young Artist catalogue, termed ‘radical acts of translation’.

A couple of months later, a smaller version of the installation was configured for the gallery’s debut exhibition, Contact Zones. A solo show, Speculum, followed, and Wim became one of four artists – along with Hylton Nel, Deborah Poynton and Guy Tillim – to join the stable at the outset and remain part of the artist list today. commune: onomatopoeia proceeded to travel to Düsseldorf, London, Paris, Tokyo and Johannesburg as part of Simon Njami’s mega-show Africa Remix. Botha’s rooms, and the distinctive visual language forged in this seminal work, continue to evolve. Ten solo shows in Cape Town and Johannesburg have taken place since, between installations at, among others, the Museum for African Art and Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, Fellbach Triennale für Kleinplastik, Göteborg Biennial, Fondation Blachère in Apt, and a survey at the Norval Foundation. The work on The Artist List, its space defined using black line, was made for Imaginary Fact, the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), and formed the central hub of The Epic Mundane at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (now Makhanda) (2014) – described by curator Brenton Maart as ‘an environment that applies Botha’s technical mastery and conceptual elegance to create an experience that suspends disbelief’.

EXHIBITED Study for the Epic Mundane, 2013 Encyclopedias, dictionaries, Bibles, historical journals, wood, steel

EDSON CHAGAS

We first encountered Edson Chagas’s work in 2013, when his series Found Not Taken was exhibited in the Angolan Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, winning the Golden Lion for best national pavilion.

Taken out of their context, and photographed in relation to a carefully chosen background, the mundane items turned into abstract icons that animate the city. Both Edson’s unusual imagery and his unconventional presentation of the images as posters made us curious. His way of seeing and sharing was a dramatic shift away from the conventional exhibitions of contemporary African photography of the time.

In 2014, several new artists from across the region joined Stevenson, and in short succession the Joburg gallery hosted shows by Portia Zvavahera, Mame-Diarra Niang and Edson. In 2015, the monograph Found Not Taken followed, produced by the gallery and published by Kehrer.

The Artist List features a preview of Common Walls , which will be shown at Stevenson Amsterdam in September 2024. In this new ongoing series Edson looks with a painterly eye at surfaces of found walls in various cities; these walls are seen as a symbol of both protection and exclusion, and their texture is like a map that represents the constant changes in the neighbourhoods in which they are situated. The works on show were taken in Lisbon, where he currently lives.

His work has been part of some notable recent exhibitions including A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern, London (2023); Currency, the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2022); and New Photography: Ocean of Images at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015).

EXHIBITED Common Walls _U3A5598, 2023

Common Walls _U3A6368, 2023

Inkjet prints on cotton paper

STEVEN COHEN

With his public interventions, which began in the late 1990s, Steven Cohen introduced a new language of performance art in South Africa. At the time of the gallery’s opening he was perhaps best known for Chandelier (2001), in which he moved through a squatter camp in the process of being demolished, dressed in illuminated chandelier-tutu. This work was included in Personal Affects, an exhibition in New York in 2004 marking South Africa’s 10th year of democracy. The sight of him suspended in the soaring space beneath the dome of the Cathedral of St John the Divine was unforgettable. At the Museum for African Art, Chandelier was screened in the intimate context of Boudoir – the seed for his current performativeinstallation of the same title. (Sophie la Girafe, central to Boudoir, resided in the gallery’s storeroom for years.)

Steven had moved to France in 2003, with his partner and artistic collaborator Elu, to join the Ballet Atlantique/Régine Chopinot; he has lived there ever since, finding a passionate audience on the European festival circuit. Discussions around his participation in our programme unfolded slowly; the nature of his art means that it is not easily transferred to a gallery space. Finally, in 2010, a mini-survey titled Life is Shot, Art is Young took place in Cape Town, his first solo in South Africa in more than 10 years. A second solo in 2012 focused on works made with Nomsa Dhlamini, the domestic worker who helped raise him. In 2017, the exhibition put your heart under your feet … and walk! was a meditation on loss, grief and absence in the wake of Elu’s death.

In 2013 Steven’s intervention Coq/Cock, at Paris’s Place de Trocadéro, explored the push and pull of dual nationalities and the limits of freedom of expression; he was arrested and found guilty of sexual exhibitionism, with no penalty. With his performance at the Heidi Horten Collection, Vienna, in July 2023 (arrested again; charges dismissed), we’re struck once more by his conviction in the power of art, and his bravery in the face of personal risk. In 2024 a long-awaited retrospective will take place at the South African National Gallery.

EXHIBITED Horten Intervention, 14/7/2023

Archival tape, make-up, glitter, bindi, synthetic eyelashes; police report; replica diamond; artist’s blood on a bandage; video (6 min 36 sec)

MESCHAC GABA

When Michael Stevenson first met Meschac Gaba at the 2006 São Paulo Biennale, the gallery had been following his work for some time. Meschac presented a large-scale model of a fantasy city made entirely from sugar. Themed How to Live Together, the exhibition also included work by Jane Alexander, Guy Tillim, Mustafa Maluka and Pieter Hugo.

Gaba had set up a studio in Rotterdam after studying at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the late 1990s, and by 2006 he was one of the most prominent artists living and working in the Netherlands. That year his work was also shown on the biennales of Gwangju, Sydney and Havana; in 2005, he had presented solo shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Tate Modern in London.

An email exchange immediately followed that first contact in São Paulo, culminating in Meschac visiting South Africa in November 2006 to research local spaces and architecture for his Tresses series – miniatures of buildings, landmarks and vehicles, sculpted from hair braids. While Meschac engaged the implications of his place of birth, he had not exhibited on this continent since 1995, and we were thrilled at the prospect of facilitating a platform for his work to be seen in this context. Together with Clive Kellner and Khwezi Gule at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, we proposed two projects: an exhibition in our Cape Town space, followed by an institutional show at JAG, with a joint publication. Our exhibition opened in August 2007, the first of six solo shows with Meschac, including twin surveys focusing on the central tenets of the artist’s practice in 2021.

Reflecting on the early days, Michael recalls visiting Meschac’s cavernous space in Rotterdam, where his major work, the 12-room installation Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–2002), was being stored; in 2012, the gallery facilitated the placement of this work with Tate. More recently, as Meschac moved his studio back to Cotonou in Benin, it has been an amazing privilege for us to visit him there.

EXHIBITED Mitsubishi 4×4, 2008, from the Car Tresses series

Braided artificial hair and mixed media

GEORGINA GRATRIX

The gallery first showed Georgina Gratrix’s work on 021 – 2021, a group exhibition of paintings made in Cape Town in 2021, presented in our Prinsengracht space.

Both Georgina and her husband, Matthew Partridge, have been friends with people at the gallery for many years, and we always admired the work from afar. That admiration was brought into sharp focus during the pandemic when not one or two but three museum shows happened in South Africa in short succession. One of those shows, The Reunion, at the Norval Foundation in 2021, was curated by Liese van der Watt, another long-time friend of the gallery. And so, when the world opened up again, and we learned that Georgina no longer had gallery representation in South Africa, we saw the opportunity to offer her a solo show and bring her work to a new audience.

When Georgina’s first solo show with us opens in Johannesburg in May 2024, it will be a full year since we announced representation. We work with Georgina alongside her galleries Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City, and Monica De Cardenas Gallery in Milan.

Vriende features the characteristically wide smile and embrace of our dear colleague Andrew da Conceicao, a founding partner of the gallery. Rest in peace Andy (1969–2023).

EXHIBITED Vriende, 2020 Oil on canvas

The gallery first encountered Ian Grose’s paintings near the end of 2010, during his grad show at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. From the outset, Ian demonstrated a remarkable command of paint, and a commitment to the traditions and philosophy of Painting with a capital P.

In May 2011, when Other Things , a version of his graduate show opened at blank projects, then a smaller space across the road from us in Cape Town, the gallery’s curatorial team looked at the work again, and closely. That year Ian received the Tollman Award and the Absa l’Atelier prize, the latter accompanied by a six-month residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Describing his encounters, while in Paris, with some of the precursors and descendants of the Impressionists, Ian wrote:

I was compelled by a vitality of mark-making, a kind of counterintuitive description of form. Looking at the pictures close-up, the categories of abstract and representational seemed to dissolve; I really understood how these painters prefigured the Abstract Expressionists in their focus on the autonomous qualities of the mark itself. I also began to think that an appreciation of the meaning of the pictures had to take into account the conditions of making them from direct observation.

In February 2013, soon after returning from Paris, Grose presented New Pictures, his first of eight solo exhibitions at the gallery. Stevenson has published two catalogues on Grose’s work: Small Paintings and Some Assumptions.

The captive, 2023

Simon Gush first showed with the gallery in 2007, in Cape Town, with an artwork titled Salute. It was the fourth project in the side gallery series –a predecessor to STAGE and RAMP – and he responded with a work about the relationship between artist and collector. The person who acquired the work had to sign an agreement to have a 21-gun salute staged at their funeral. At the time, Simon was invested in alternatives to the commercial circuit and so when he received the invitation he made a work that could only be poignant and effective within the parameters of a financial transaction.

Michael Stevenson had first met Simon at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (now Makhanda) in 2006. Simon was installing an exhibition of the SABC Art Collection, and later that year came to Cape Town to install Berni Searle’s solo show Crush at the gallery in Green Point. At the time, concurrently to his art practice and installation work, Simon was running The Parking Gallery, a project space located in an underground parking lot in Joburg’s inner city. It was through the Parking Gallery that Joost Bosland got to know him and learned more about the space and his art.

Gush’s interest in the mechanics of the art world and its relationship to labour has resulted in a few intra-gallery interventions, including the extension of the Joburg gallery’s opening hours and the installation of a ‘Clocking In’ machine that gallery workers were required to use to capture their daily arrival and departure from the office. His work over the years has become increasingly centred on questions of work and labour. For The Artist List he presents The Busiest Airline in Africa, a reworked mural from his 2021 Johannesburg exhibition, which draws on his interdisciplinary practice as artist, filmmaker and academic. It examines the defunct passenger airline Wenela Air Services, which transported labourers from neighbouring African countries to South African mines, and the effects of a 1974 crash on the political economy of the region.

EXHIBITED The Busiest Airline in Africa, 2021–23

Paint on wall, hand-printed silver gelatin photographs, digital video (7 min 51 sec), mixed media

PIETER HUGO

Michael Stevenson met Pieter Hugo by chance at the Sea Point pool in 2003. When Kathy Grundlingh, the gallery’s first photographic curator, and Michael first saw his portraits of people with albinism, they immediately offered him an exhibition. His large-format frontal colour portraits marked a distinct departure from the documentary iconography of the time in South Africa. Pieter chose a forthright approach to his visual essays: he looked directly, not passively, and in turn he was looked at.

After the first exhibition, he continued to work across Africa, mainly taking portraits of groups of people, often part of subcultures or with unusual occupations requiring a specific attire. These included his now iconic series ‘Gadawan Kura’ – The Hyena Men (2005–7), which remains to this day the most consistently requested body of work that the gallery has ever presented. Stevenson has been involved in the numerous publications of Pieter’s work and he has had more than 10 solo shows in our various spaces. The editing sessions, with hundreds of images displayed all around Pieter’s studio in ever-changing order until the sequence feels resolved, continue to be one of the most cherished moments in the book and exhibition-making processes for our curatorial team.

In The Artist List, we see exhibited for the first time images taken in 2023 as part of a collaboration with Travis Scott. Hugo’s photographic world has influenced the American musician’s celebrity aesthetic, in particular images from The Hyena Men and Nollywood. When commissioning the cover of the album Utopia, Scott gave Pieter carte blanche to photograph him in Nigeria, imagining him in the context of these two series; the artist developed a tight collection of images that revisits these bodies of work from a popculture perspective.

Dirty Laundry, 2023

We first discovered Ruth Ige’s work in a New York Times article that covered her show at Karma Gallery in 2019, and a curiosity about her imagery has stayed with us since then. It was only in 2021 that an opportunity to work together presented itself through the group show my whole body changed into something else. We soon noticed how her work was in conversation with artists like Odili, Portia and Serge who all use colour in very specific ways to engage subjects around space, politics and spirituality, among other matters. Our relationship with Ruth continued with participation in various art fairs, including our second edition of Studios as part of our Frieze London booth in 2022. She officially joined the artist list months later, following the opening of her debut solo exhibition with the gallery in Johannesburg, Freedom’s recurring dream. On this show, Ruth wrote: In a place between two dimensions, I saw freedom personified. I saw that, in both her waking and sleeping, she would have recurring dreams and visions – dreams of liberation, hope, wonder, sorrow, joy and justice. A mothering entity, I could see her watching, hoping and longing for the best for the black diaspora and black individuals in their navigation of life. Her heart ached as she saw the injustice inflicted through the ages. I saw her cheering and rising to her feet when she witnessed movements of resistance. She would wail and grieve like a mother who lost her child every time a black life was lost or wrongly taken. She would visit people in the night through their dreams, giving words of encouragement, but also ideas and tools to fight against systems of oppression. At times she would appear as an apparition of light and wrap her arms around those who were disheartened. She would give spiritual gifts shaped like flowers and bestow mantels of blessings on those who needed them.

Sisipho Ngodwana visited her studio in New Zealand in 2022, and she is the first artist on our list from Oceania. Yet her work remains grounded in Africa and speaks to the ethereal nature of art to transgress border and difference – a leitmotif of our programme.

SOSA JOSEPH

Sosa Joseph is one of the most recent additions to our artist list, having held her first solo show with the gallery in May 2023. A close friend of the gallery, Salim Currimjee, alerted us to Sosa’s painting, on view in Mumbai. With her exhibition Where do we come from?, exploring the ‘riverine world’ of southern Kerala where she grew up and which continues to richly inform her aesthetic, we were excited to find the imaginative language we had long been looking for in this part of the world. Zoom meetings followed, and in October last year Sophie Perryer and David Brodie visited Sosa’s studio in Bangalore, where a new body of work was underway. At the same time, directors and friends in New York were able to see Sosa’s painting What are we? III, first shown on the Kochi-Muziris biennale in 2012, installed at the Metropolitan Museum as part of the collection.

Sosa’s debut exhibition in Cape Town, The Hushed History of Oblivion, was a personal homage to victims of the Indian Ocean slave trade, particularly those from Kerala and its surrounds. She based her paintings on traces of documentation from actual lives, encompassing moments from the most brutal to the incidental. The series continued with two new paintings, dramatic scenes from slave ships, made for Sosa’s first showing at Frieze London this October. Cassava Eaters, Cochin, 1600s (titled after Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters), by contrast, places its emphasis on the everyday, with slaves cooking and eating the staple food while awaiting transport, and also tending children, in the company of animals – a scene that, despite its heavy context, is infused with colour, light and life.

EXHIBITED Cassava Eaters, Cochin, 1600s, 2023

BRONWYN KATZ

Bronwyn Katz, one of our newest represented artists, has in our minds been a member of the gallery family for some time. She is a founding member of the iQhiya collective (established 2015), and as admirers of her work, we invited her to take part in The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2016), a group show which emerged from a conversation between Joost Bosland and Moshekwa Langa in response to K Sello Duiker’s epic novel. The show extended beyond our space in Cape Town, spilling over to neighbouring gallery blank projects, which represented her at the time. The collaboration continued to the Johannesburg iteration of the show, which included two other artists represented by blank, Igshaan Adams and Turiya Magadlela.

Bronwyn featured in 9 More Weeks (2018), a gallery publication of artist interviews conducted by Sinazo Chiya. Back then, she was the only interviewed artist who was not represented by the gallery, and when the book was turned into an exhibition later that year, she continued her participation. In late 2022 we began a dialogue about a possible project at the gallery, and in 2023, together with Andrew Kreps Gallery, we proposed showing |xabi – her presentation for the 2021 Future Generation Art Prize exhibition in Kiev – to Art Basel Unlimited. The proposal was accepted and shortly thereafter Katz agreed to join the gallery. Her first solo with us will take place in Johannesburg in March 2024.

Katz’s sculptures and installations make use of natural elements, speaking to our relationship with the earth as well as man-made elements produced most often in relation to or for the body. Her usage of deconstructed mattresses – the coiled bed springs, the foam, the frames – may raise questions about shelter, comfort and homelessness. The pot-scourers which cover the bedspring tentacles, their composition and movement akin to oceanic forms, speak to the politics of black hair, labour and care.

EXHIBITED xon||xu-b |’amiros (sweet thorn star), 2023 Salvaged bedsprings, pot scourers, spirits of salt and wire

How Mawande Ka Zenzile’s artistic practice is rooted in a profound intellectual rigor is reflected in the publications with covers featuring his work, notably The Politics of Custom Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa from the University of Chicago Press (2018), and Epistemic Justice and the Postcolonial University from Wits University Press (2022). These events, among other examples of his influence within the academy, highlight the powerful link between his creative endeavours and scholarly discourse.

The former is fronted by his sculpture Silence, a poignant piece that debuted in Mawande’s inaugural solo exhibition, Experimentation: All Hell Breaks Loose, at Stevenson in 2014. This marked the genesis of a collaborative journey characterised by imaginative and transformative modifications to the gallery spaces, illustrating Mawande’s ability to merge art and environment.

The diversity of Mawande’s artistic repertoire is evident in the wide array of mediums and forms showcased across his subsequent exhibitions. From cow dung to oil paint, performance, video, sculpture and installation, his work embodies a remarkable breadth, each expression thoughtfully attuned to the mood and thematic essence of the body of work it represents.

Mawande’s artistic language draws from a rich tapestry of influences, skilfully interweaving visual and emotional impact. His ability to bridge alternative epistemologies infuses his art with a transcendent quality, delving into themes of mysticism, ritual and spirituality. This reflexive engagement with diverse modes of perception and comprehension underscores the unwavering depth of his philosophical and intellectual pursuits, as he seamlessly integrates indigenous knowledge and modes of expression, positioning his work within a lineage of creative thinkers dedicated to unravelling the profound mysteries of existence and the cosmos.

DADA KHANYISA

Dada Khanyisa completed a Bachelor of Fine Art degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2016. Their graduate show, Father Figure, was an autobiographical installation that referred to their own life and how, in a space where there is no father, television takes on the role of guiding young minds. The exhibition included a lifesize replica of the living room of their childhood home. This immersive, nostalgic and intimate setting, in Dada’s signature style, was our first formal encounter with their practice. In 2017 a work from this show, What is this patriarchy you speak of?, depicting a family sharing a meal, was included in our group exhibition A Painting Today.

One year later, in 2018, Dada’s first solo exhibition, Bamb’iphone, opened in Woodstock. In this presentation of three-dimensional assemblage paintings, drawings and sculptures, Dada explored the idea of the ubiquitous everyday object that nonetheless retains its ability to confer social capital –the cellphone.

In March 2020, just before the pandemic, Dada presented their second solo show, Good Feelings, in Johannesburg, creating solipsistic scenes set against the backdrop of communal living, with each character depicted as fundamentally isolated yet deeply entwined. A catalogue for Good Feelings was published, covering early and recent works. It features an essay by Sinazo Chiya, a conversation between the artist and Julie Nxadi, and studio notes from an interview by Sisipho Ngodwana and Alexander Richards. While living in Paris during their Cité internationale des arts residency in 2022, Dada was awarded the FNB Art Prize. The prize was a solo show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. This institution had a special place in the artist’s heart, having visited the museum as a child with their aunt. Their exhibition Cape Town opened in September 2023 to large crowds and the feeling of a space having life breathed into it.

EXHIBITED Amawele: Thandiwe, 2023

Mixed media and found objects on wood

Moshekwa Langa was always an artist close to the gallery’s heart. His freewheeling language and global scope in many ways set the stage for what was possible for South African artists after 1994, and he was a source of inspiration to many of the young artists we worked with in the initial years of the gallery. Yet, because he was represented by colleagues, etiquette determined our admiration take place at a distance. We did include his work in two group shows: a handful of spectral portraits in the group show Afterlife, and drawings from 2001, featuring the phrase ‘I’m so sorry’, in Chroma in 2015.

Around this time we learned that Moshekwa had parted ways with his other galleries. He was living in Amsterdam, and on one of our visits to Viviane Sassen, a Dutch photographer we have represented since 2011, we made an appointment to see him. Several studio visits across Amsterdam, Paris and Johannesburg ensued, and slowly it became clear that we were on the same page about the road ahead. We decided to make a big solo show in Cape Town our first focus for 2016 and, to put his work in context for our international audience, conceived a mini-survey for our booth at Frieze New York that year, with work from 1997 to 2016 drawn from his personal archive. Since then we have presented three further solo shows, and recently a two-person show juxtaposing early figurative drawings with prints by John Muafangejo, who Moshekwa has credited as a formative influence.

Moshekwa has been pivotal in the development of our Amsterdam space. That we represented him and Viviane was the main reason we signed a three-year lease on a small space in 2019, in Viviane’s studio building on the Prinsengracht. He also introduced us to Neo Matloga, when the latter was studying at De Ateliers. Neo became the third Amsterdam artist to join the artist list, followed by Cian-Yu Bai. Today, Moshekwa lives walking distance from our gallery, and rents a studio in the same building. More importantly, he has opened many doors for us in the often hermetic Amsterdam art world, serving as a local guide to this strange interloper from South Africa called Stevenson. EXHIBITED Dawn, 2021/23

In 2017 Moshekwa Langa mentioned to us that there was another artist from Limpopo who had decamped to Amsterdam. Neo Matloga, 23 at the time, was studying at De Ateliers, the Amsterdam art school that also produced Mustafa Maluka and Dineo Seshee Bopape, and where Marlene Dumas taught for many years. Sometime in the northern hemisphere spring, we met Neo for tea at the café of the Rijksmuseum. It was the start of a long exchange about life, art and geography that continues today.

In 2018 Neo won the Royal Award for Painting (the year before Cian-Yu Bai), and a year later he was nominated for the Volkskrant Visual Art Award, both important prizes in the Dutch cultural landscape. The first time Neo exhibited work at this gallery was in the portraiture show About Face, our summer group exhibition for 2018–19. Back of the Moon, Neo’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, opened in July 2020. The works had been painted in GaMamaila, the village where he grew up. Because of the severe lockdowns in place in South Africa at that point, neither Neo nor the works were able to come to Johannesburg initially. He photographed the works himself on his phone, and whenever the cellphone signal was strong enough (coverage in rural South Africa remains a challenge), would send the files to the gallery. The virtual exhibition consisted of photographs of the works in-situ outside his studio, adding an unexpected layer to the project. The virtual opening had visitors logging in from around the world.

At present Neo divides his time between Amsterdam, Johannesburg and GaMamaila, and he maintains studios in all three locations. He continues to be a prominent figure in the Dutch artworld, most recently winning the 2021 ABN AMRO Art Award. Matloga’s third solo show with us, Figures, in which he moved away from his signature collaged faces, took place at our Amsterdam gallery in late 2023.

EXHIBITED Letena, 2022

MELEKO MOKGOSI

We first noticed Meleko Mokgosi’s name on the list of Studio Museum residents for 2011-12. When we read about him in The Art Newspaper a few months later (he had won the Mohn Award at the Made in LA biennale), we reached out and invited him for a visit to Cape Town. In January 2013, Meleko spent a week visiting us, and getting to know the nascent Cape Town art scene. This was four years before the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and A4 opened, five years before the Norval Foundation; the only dedicated contemporary art museum was the nowdefunct New Church. After the visit, we resolved to work together to make sure his work was part of the conversation in southern Africa.

The first work we showed was a series of annotated reproductions of wall texts from museum exhibitions. This was part of King’s County, a group show of four Brooklyn-based artists that was a response to the many geography-based exhibitions South African artists are subjected to when desiring to show abroad. The other artists in the exhibition were Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Wangechi Mutu, and the show even attracted notice in The New York Times, which dedicated half a page to a review.

Two solo shows followed, in 2016 and 2019. In the meanwhile, Meleko moved, first from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, then back to New York to take up a professorship at NYU, and most recently to Massachusetts, where he is now Co-Director of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking at the famed Yale School of Art. Despite the extra challenges posed by the distance, our relationship has remained close and visits to his studio have become a cherished part of our trips to the United States. In June 2024 we will present his next solo show, in our Johannesburg gallery.

EXHIBITED Untitled (God Loves Us), 2023 Oil on canvas

PAULO NAZARETH

Our conversations with Paulo Nazareth started in early 2016 on a balcony in Hong Kong with his Brazilian gallerists from Mendes Wood DM. However, it was only in November 2018 in New York that Paulo and his team expressed interest in realising a major project with us, The Elephant Stone – an incredible work that would comprise eight life-size elephants carved from stone, one buried in the Atlantic Ocean and the rest in collections across the seven continents. This, we were informed by Paulo, ‘would be an easy project that would require very little time as I have already done all the research’.

Today, after three solo shows across Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam and inclusion in seven group shows with us, this project is yet to be realised and we have very little information on Paulo’s whereabouts. Several days ago after checking in on him, we got the infamous ‘one second please’ response and we’ve heard rumours that he might be on his way to Cape Town – presumably to arrive in February 2024.

This is not alarming for someone who’s come to embody the true definition of a Trecheiro – a concept much elaborated on in his catalogue PHAMBI KWENDLOVU, published on the occasion of his first show of the same title. On the work exhibited here, Paulo shares: Saci is a name that comes from Tupi-Guarani, it is a cosmic being represented by the image of a young black man with one leg who lives doing pranks but can also bring us good luck – he is a being that mixes characteristics of Guarani cosmology and of Kaingang indigenous peoples of southern Brazil but it is also about shoes ... and it is about our histori … During slavery, enslaved people could not wear shoes, they were prohibited by law. Even today, in many places you cannot enter without shoes. In this work the shoes form a spiral pointing inwards in an anticlockwise direction. How to rewind time or present it in a non-linear way. Upon reflection on his trajectory, we see the magic in his formula, inspired by the folklore on Saci – it is one that is full of tricks, twists and turns, yet one that is of profound generosity. Our relationship with Paulo has been made seamless by our friends from Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo – who, when we couldn’t reach Paulo on Facebook, would send a fairy to his mother’s house letting him know to respond to us. Once again, two weeks later, he responds, ‘hello, are you there? one second please’, and then we know he’s about to cross a border somewhere in the world, making history less and less forgettable. EXHIBITED SACI, 2020

SIMPHIWE

From the time he was a student, there was a great deal of excitement about Simphiwe Ndzube’s work at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, from both his peers and his lecturers. His unique use of allegory and textile as well as his command of the imagery of magical realism made Simphiwe’s language distinctive and compelling from the start.

We followed his work throughout his years as an undergrad, with Michael Stevenson doing a number of studio visits with him at Michaelis. He went on to win the Michaelis Prize in 2015 and later, after a nomination from the gallery, received the Tollman Award in 2016. In the same year Simphiwe moved to Los Angeles where his international visibility increased, and following a studio visit with Lerato Bereng in 2018 at his studio in LA’s fashion district, he took part in two group shows at the gallery. His first solo with us, Uncharted Lands and Trackless Seas, took place in Cape Town in 2019.

Since then, Simphiwe has had three solo exhibitions with the gallery, his most recent produced in his newly established Cape Town studio in Woodstock. He currently has a first solo show at Blum in LA, titled Chorus, a body of work which centres on South African choral music traditions. This idea first took form with the painting Black Mambazo from his 2022 Cape Town solo, Masemola Road, and is exemplified by the work in The Artist List, part of a new series of miniature paintings of choirs.

Michael Stevenson started collecting Hylton Nel’s work while he was a student at the University of Cape Town in the late 1980s; in those years Hylton still lived in Mowbray and lectured at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Michael’s first purchase, a green plate, cost R30.

Hylton was one of the first artists to agree to become a part of the gallery’s project – he was on the artist list from the beginning. At the time of our launch in May 2003 he had been somewhat overlooked in South Africa, after a decade of living remotely and exhibiting with the Fine Art Society in London, where he was collected by many celebrities including Cher and Michael Palin. His first solo show, in the summer slot in the gallery’s first year, was met with some surprise and the repeated question, ‘Could ceramics be contemporary art?’ In a conversation with Michael, Hylton described how he sees it:

I am trying to get my ceramics to be like part of life, a gesture, like sitting down on a chair, or setting a table or frying an egg. What seems natural is what I am trying for, or in other words, the idea of things which are born not made is something I think about quite often. That is what I see in a lot of the ceramics that I admire – they seem just to be – so I try to make things that are just there. The fact that I use the things that I make every day helps me to anchor it in reality. It is not in our culture in this country to go and buy regional ceramics made by a local potter because machines and factories have taken over. For me it is important to make things that are real and that would continue to be real.

The gallery published a first monograph on Nel in 2003, to catalogue that first solo show, and a second on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 2010. During the pandemic we launched a website dedicated to his archive, and a third book is currently in the works.

EXHIBITED 29 October 2023

MAME-DIARRA NIANG

A feature in Contemporary And, published in January 2014, prompted a meeting between Federica Angelucci and Mame-Diarra Niang in Paris a few months later. Aptly, as movement and territory are pivotal categories in the artist’s critical thinking, the conversation continued during a walk across the city. At The Wall, her first solo show at Stevenson Johannesburg, followed in September of that year.

Mame-Diarra’s bodies of work encompass photography, video, performance, sound and installation. Her personal errance might be seen as akin to the act of scattering hints and fragments through a treasure hunt, and there is no set path to navigate through the visual clues she offers. Instead, she makes provision for the audience to be guided by emotion and to revel in the entwined journeys of ‘belonging’ and ‘becoming’. Challenging the prevailing conventions around photography, her images resist the straightforward classification of ‘landscapes’ or ‘portraits’, and function as portals for inquiry and self-discovery. Here, we showcase a piece from the series Léthé, which reflects on the integral role of memories and erasures in the making of the self.

Mame-Diarra’s first mid-career survey, Self as a Forgotten Monument, takes place at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town in 2023/24; it features two photographic trilogies, The Citadel and Remember to Forget, as well as a new chapter from the ongoing multichannel video and sound installation Since Time is Distance in Space. She has had three solo shows at Stevenson. Notable curated group shows include Thinking Historically in the Present, the 15th Sharjah Biennale (2023); Currency, the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2022); DAK’ART OFF, 14th Dakar Biennale, Senegal (2022); Movin’Grounds, 38CC, Delft, the Netherlands (2020); Travesías atlánticas, the 4th Montevideo Biennial (2019); and Affective Affinities, the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018).

The Citadel: a trilogy was published in 2022 by Mack as a threevolume edition, articulating her ‘personal but analytic relationship with place’; she is at work on her next edition with the publisher.

EXHIBITED Ce qui n’est pas encore là et ce qui a disparu, 2021 Archival pigment print on cotton paper

SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA

In 2008, Serge Alain Nitegeka was completing his third year of a Fine Art degree at Wits University in Johannesburg. A friend of the gallery mentioned a ‘young man doing some really interesting things with portraiture’, and, ever curious, we arranged a visit. Serge’s studio at that time was on the university’s East Campus, in a building on Jorrison Street in Braamfontein. Very much a communal area, the studio was buzzing with other students hard at work around us, and our meeting was something between a oneon-one coffee and a group chat.

During that first encounter the focus of our conversation, primarily, was a series of extraordinary self-portraits executed in charcoal and drawn directly onto, and into, second-hand wooden crates in various stages of disassembly. The mound of pine and plywood, precariously stacked a few metres high, spoke of a conception of humanity that was at once fragile and determined.

A few months later we presented The Human Cargo, our first installation of Serge’s work, at our gallery space in Craighall, Johannesburg, as part of the group show Self/Not Self, closely followed by Cargo, the second project in our side gallery series in Cape Town.

Serge joined the artist list in 2009 and has presented nine solo exhibitions with the gallery, across all its locations. In September 2023 a large-scale sculpture by Serge was placed on long-term loan in the public area of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

EXHIBITED Found Object II, 2016

While Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi had been on the gallery’s radar for some time, Lerato Bereng first encountered her Heroes paintings in 2013 at Room Gallery on Juta Street in Braamfontein (where the gallery was located until 2019), then at the Goethe Institute in 2018. Thenjiwe collaborated regularly with her friend and fellow artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, and sat on a panel organised by Joburg collective Keleketla! as part of Makhwapheni, the gallery’s short-lived pop-up project space in our parking basement in Braamfontein. Thenjiwe worked independently for a number of years, enacting her art as social practice and creating platforms and occasions for exhibitions for herself and other practitioners at a time when gallery and project spaces were limited and focused elsewhere.

In 2016, Lerato initiated studio visits – at the time Thenjiwe was working on an extensive commission of her ongoing Heroes paintings, the same series Lerato had seen three years before. This body of work was shown as part of the group exhibition Being There – Art Afrique, Le Nouvel Atelier at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in 2017, a show that featured several of the gallery’s artists.

Thenjiwe’s first showings with the gallery took place in Cape Town as part of the group exhibitions A Painting Today in 2017 and About Face in the summer of 2019. Her first solo exhibition as a represented artist, Gymnasium, was scheduled to open in Johannesburg on 26 March 2020, the day South Africa began its first Covid-19 lockdown. While the exhibition could not be attended physically, the virtual opening of the solo was impactful, powerfully speaking to questions about space and vulnerability. Thenjiwe has since held a presentation in each of the gallery’s three spaces, with Stadium in Amsterdam marking her first show in Europe.

EXHIBITED Gala (Rejoicing), 2023 Oil on Belgian linen

ODILI DONALD ODITA

When the gallery opened in 2003, Odili Donald Odita was one of about a dozen African artists exhibiting internationally at the highest level, banging down the museum doors and claiming a seat at the table. Among the others were, in no particular order, Meschac Gaba, William Kentridge, Moshekwa Langa, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Candice Breitz, Robin Rhode, Barthélémy Toguo, Kendell Geers, Julie Mehretu and Wangechi Mutu. This was at a time, hard to imagine now, when virtually no artists from elsewhere in Africa were being shown in South Africa in a serious or sustained manner. Odili was part of a group of intellectuals in New York that converged around Nka, a journal dedicated to contemporary African art and its debates, alongside Olu Oguibe, Okwui Enwezor, Chika Okeke-Agulu and Salah Hassan. We met Odili in 2005 through Claude Simard, one of the owners of Jack Shainman Gallery, then a serious but small New York gallery with an at-the-time unusual interest in artists of colour, particularly artists from Africa and its various diasporas. We invited Odili to take part in Distant Relatives/Relative Distance, a 2006 group show in Cape Town of six artists living in the West with close family ties to the continent. It was a way to show this pioneering generation who, internationally, often exhibited alongside South African artists, but had rarely been seen in South Africa after the two Johannesburg biennials. The show was such a novelty that the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg asked us to tour it there, and our curatorial statement was published in the opinion pages of a local newspaper. Odili travelled to South Africa for the Joburg leg of the show, installing a site-specific wall painting at the museum. His first solo show with Stevenson took place two years later, in 2008, in Cape Town. His presence in our programme dovetailed with a renewed interest in abstraction in South Africa, and in 2012 he was part of a threeperson presentation of abstraction from our part of the world at Art Basel, alongside Zander Blom and Ernest Mancoba. Most recently we presented a series of his small paintings in our Amsterdam space, Odili’s fifth solo show with the gallery.

EXHIBITED Collage Studies 4, 2023

Photocopy collage, adhesive tape on graph paper

FRIDA ORUPABO

We first encountered Frida Orupabo’s work at Frieze London in October 2018 at the booth of her Swedish gallery, Nordenhake. Her command of the language of collage was fresh and arresting, as a result of which Lerato Bereng visited Norway in early 2019, meeting Frida at Kunsternes Hus in Oslo and offering her a solo exhibition. Frida, at the time a new mother, was installing her two-person show with Arthur Jafa, Medicine for a Nightmare, a continuation of a collaboration that began when Jafa invited her onto his 2017 group show at the Serpentine in London. The Serpentine show was the first time she had made and exhibited physical collages. Frida had connected with Jafa in 2016 when he reached out to her via her Instagram page @ nemiepeba, a meditative archive of imagery contemplating blackness. At that point Frida was working as a social worker and had not yet exhibited as an artist. Following the Serpentine show, which travelled to the Julia Stoscheck Collection in Berlin, Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Frida began practising as a part-time artist and her career grew. Her first solo shows took place at Galerie Nordenhake and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in 2018 and she was invited to participate in the 2019 Venice Biennale shortly after.

In 2020 Frida left her job in social work to commit to artistic practice full-time and she had her first solo show with our gallery in October that year – a complicated one due to Covid-19, and she was unable to travel to South Africa. Hours After marked her first solo showing on the continent and its attendant publication, the first on her work, was produced in 2021. It was following this show that Frida joined the gallery formally, presenting three solo projects since.

EXHIBITED Car Ride, 2022

Collage with paper pins on birch plywood panel

DEBORAH POYNTON

Deborah Poynton’s association with the gallery precedes the opening of our Green Point space by some months, with Michael Stevenson presenting her paintings at the Irma Stern Museum in early 2003. He had first encountered the work in 1998 when Everard Read hosted a show at the Cape Law Chambers, and found it a shock to see realism that was imaginative rather than descriptive, and with such emotional and personal intensity. The painting Traders was included in our first annual summer exhibition, South African Art 1800 to now. A solo show followed in 2004, accompanied by one of the gallery’s small catalogues with a conversation between artist and gallerist. An extract:

Your work is centred around the well-worn phrase of the ‘human condition’. However, it is much more than the portrayal of humans, or ‘figurative’ painting, because even when you paint a still-life, or an empty landscape, or a bare interior, your work resonates with fragility, fear, vulnerability, sensuality, uncertainty. In your words, ‘a painting must sing’ – is it when it provokes these emotive responses to our brittle and transient lives?

Perhaps a painting sings when it has a tautness of surface but also of meaning, when it contains contradictions. Then it resounds and reflects. I think every painting of mine is about the fear of death. It is about longing. About my longing, my fear. But we recognise these things in each other. Throw humour, passion, beauty, intricacy into it, allow a dream into it, and it will start to sing.

In the same catalogue it is noted that Poynton works outside of prevailing trends; in 2004, in contemporary art practice, the tradition of painting was often considered moribund. While today the medium has enjoyed a massive resurgence, Deborah remains something of an ‘outsider’, even with 13 solo shows at the gallery and a 30-year survey at the Netherlands’ Drents Museum, specialising in realist art, in 2021. Painting, yet conceptual; often figurative, yet devoid of overt symbolic signifiers – her accomplished work remains filled with paradoxes that resist easy interpretation.

Our conversation with Jo Ractliffe began in 2009 as she embarked on her project tracing the routes of the Border War fought by South Africa in Angola in the 1970s and 80s. She had us riveted with tales of her wilderness survival skills (which were excellent) and travelling alongside ex-soldiers to explore the spaces and traces of war. In early 2010 she joined the gallery, and a triptych from this series – mural portraits of Fidel Castro, Agostinho Neto and Leonid Brezhnev – was included in the group show This is Our Time. This was followed by As Terras do Fim do Mundo, the solo exhibition and book –the first of many publishing collaborations – and the work was presented at Paris Photo, with a book signing. Nominations for the Discovery Prize at the Rencontres d’Arles and for Best Photobook at the International Photobook Festival in Kassel followed in 2011.

Jo brought passionate curators, collectors and publishers to the gallery. Artur Walther, who first saw Jo’s work when he visited South Africa with Okwui Enwezor in 2005, opened his New York project space in 2011 with a show of As Terras, and in 2020 was the co-publisher, with Steidl, of Jo’s book Photographs 1980s – now (also produced by the gallery), which came out around the time of her survey, Drives, at the Art Institute of Chicago. The third installment of her Angolan war series, The Borderlands, was published by RM Editions, and works from the trilogy were shown at, among other places, Tate Modern, London, and the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

In 2015, Jo sustained a spinal cord injury that, she wrote, ‘altered my life and the way I see things’. Subsequent exhibitions – Everything is Everything in 2017, Signs of Life in 2019 and Being There in 2021, all accompanied by publications – explored different ways of working from the research-based, extended photo essay for which she had become known. Landscaping, in 2023, her eighth solo with the gallery, represents something of a return to this modus operandi, yet more open-ended in purpose, at a different pace, offering new ways to think through the action of witnessing.

In 2005, Robin Rhode was the youngest artist in the Venice Biennial, and in 2008 he had his first show with White Cube in London. He had lived in Berlin since 2001, and had been showing extensively in the United States since 2004. In many ways he felt out of reach for a small, new commercial gallery in Cape Town, at a time when the world took scant notice of art made or exhibited in Africa. In 2011 we visited Variants, his second show at White Cube, which was so unequivocal, with such a sophisticated understanding of space, performance and the moving image, that we started to fantasise about exhibiting his work. Not long after, printed invitation cards for solo shows at Tucci Russo in Turin and Fons Welters in Amsterdam reached our gallery, and lingered on top of our to-do pile for months. Eventually we built up enough courage to write him an email. Here is an excerpt: Over the last two years, our gallery has come of age in many ways. We now do all the major art fairs (except for Frieze London, but including Frieze New York), and through artists like Pieter Hugo and Nicholas Hlobo we have gotten access to a world of curators and collectors that was previously out of reach ...

We have noticed your recent projects with Fons Welters and Tucci Russo (which had wonderful images on their invites), and of course are aware of the closure of Rubenstein’s New York space. In this light, we just want to reiterate that if you would ever want to do something with us (in SA or elsewhere; on a project basis or in a more sustained manner), we are a phone call or email away.

On 13 January 2012 we received a response from Robin, and a visit to Rhodeworks, his Berlin studio, followed shortly thereafter. In April 2013 we staged Paries Pictus, an exhibition and homecoming celebration in our Woodstock space. In the years since, we have done three more solo shows in South Africa, one in Amsterdam in 2019, before it became a permanent gallery location, and an exhibition of his Fragment Paintings in his studio space on Berlin’s Provinzstrasse during the lockdowns of 2020.

EXHIBITED Canna, 2022 C-prints

VIVIANE SASSEN

Michael Stevenson and Federica Angelucci first saw Viviane Sassen’s work at Paris Photo in 2009; her prints from Flamboya made an impression with their fresh and contemporary way of engaging with our region and with the human psyche.

Viviane spent her childhood years in Kenya and often speaks of how, on her family’s return to the Netherlands, she felt like a foreigner in her homeland, while knowing that she had also been an outsider in Africa. Later, with her camera she sculpted scenes reminiscent of her dreams and memories in order to process them, and this approach continued to underpin subsequent series exploring her relationship with death (Umbra), fertility (Of Mud and Lotus) and sexuality (Venus & Mercury) in an increasingly experimental way, including paint on photographs, collages and video installations.

Viviane’s work has been a central part of Stevenson’s programme in the last 13 years. In 2019, she let us know that there was an available space in the building where she has her studio and proposed we rent it, giving us the impetus to open our Amsterdam gallery.

She recalled once that when she won the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2007, there was grumbling from other artists who thought it ‘ridiculous’ that someone with such a hybrid CV had won an art prize — ‘not just a photographer, but also a photographer who worked in fashion and commercial photography’. Her latest survey celebrates precisely this duality. Phosphor: Art and Fashion at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris spans 30 years of practice, from works shown in her graduate studies exhibition to the latest large-scale collages and painted prints, as well as an immersive catwalk-like installation of the highlights of her fashion career.

Bookmaking is another language in which she excels: Viviane has realised 25 publications to date, each opening up a new way of looking at her images, individually and in relation to each other. We have taken great pleasure in participating in the processes of editing and design to bring them to fruition.

EXHIBITED Consequences/Cadavre Exquis #8, 2023 Paper collage on Canson Rag paper

SHINE

We had been looking at work emerging from the Indian subcontinent for over a decade, and while the gallery scene there was vibrant and growing year by year, we had not yet found artists whose practice resonated clearly with our programming.

Salim Currimjee, an artist and dear friend of the gallery, had been following the work of Shine Shivan for some time, and it was his keen eye that first brought Shine’s work to our attention. We were struck at once by what we saw: an artist working with imagery sourced from Vedic myth and legend in a manner that allowed the works to reside in, and also move beyond, their cultural and mythological specificity. About the work on this exhibition, Shine notes:

In 1814 ‘Atma Sabha’ was initiated by Raja Ram Mohan Rai in Calcutta. As I read the Upanishads and [Bhagavad] Gita, I encountered forms and energy of this visible, invisible world, how it functions, and which continue to exist as a world of unmingled, uninterpreted action, revealing the energy in nature.

‘Atma’ means soul, ‘Sabh’a’ means delegations. So this is a ‘delegation of soul’. In this artwork the central figure is a symbol of any earthly being in an anthropomorphic gesture contemplating the essence of divine envelopment.

Shine joined the artist list in 2022, exhibiting alongside Jane Alexander in the first iteration of Juxtapositions, and has his first solo exhibition in Johannesburg early in 2024.

EXHIBITED Atma Sabha, 2023

Sanguine, charcoal and dry pastel on paper

In 2003, when the gallery was founded, Penny Siopis was already one of South Africa’s most influential and highly regarded artists. At the time, she was working on her Shame paintings, and a group of these small, intimate ‘imaginings of childhood sexuality and dread’, in which her overarching concern with the ‘poetics of vulnerability’ is manifest, was included on our first year-end show, Literally and figuratively. The groundbreaking nature of this series was affirmed in 2021 when we presented Shame – alongside Shadow Shame Again, a film responding to the dual pandemics of Covid and gender-based violence – in Art Basel’s OVR: Pioneers.

Penny’s first solo show in Cape Town since 1984 was at the gallery in 2007; she joined the artist list in 2008. This exhibition remains particularly memorable for us as Penny continued working on the large central painting, Monument, for days after the opening, and each morning we were greeted by a new version of the work – exemplifying her embrace of the concept of change. For our fifth birthday exhibition, Disguise, she showed Ambush, based on Hokusai’s Dream of a Fisherman’s Wife. She wrote later that ‘something happened’ with this painting, the ’unpredictable life’ of her mediums of liquid ink and viscous glue making them perfect for the ‘radically contingent’ way she wanted to work. This process, open to chance and the agency of the nonhuman, is the subject of Material Acts (2018), one of a number of books on her work published or produced by the gallery over the years.

In 2010 Penny’s film Obscure White Messenger debuted in This is Our Time, a show based around our FOREX programme. Concerns with colonialism, war, violence, migration, globalisation and climate change appear throughout her films, as is evident in the survey Never the Same Water Twice, presented in Cape Town in 2023 to mark her 70th birthday. Beyond our spaces, in 2024 her first European retrospective takes place at Athens’ National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), curated by Katerina Gregos. And a book on her filmmaking, edited by Sarah Nuttall, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. EXHIBITED Origin of the World, 2020/23

Michael Stevenson met Guy Tillim in the late 1990s, an era in which documentary photography’s rigid conventions had evolved in recording the years of apartheid. The prevailing aesthetic was very much conditioned by David Goldblatt’s remarkable way of seeing, a respectful reference throughout Guy’s work. He photographed in a South Africa emerging from many years of cultural isolation, and his complex imagery of Africa was distinctive for its rendering of the post-colonial landscape. Around 2000, although photography had just started to be perceived as an aspect of contemporary art in South Africa, it was still considered unconventional to include such work in the programming of a contemporary gallery.

He is one of three artists Michael worked with as a private dealer before the gallery opened its doors. His series Departure was the second exhibition in the gallery programme, and the first solo show that Stevenson – then Michael Stevenson Contemporary – hosted. The monograph of the series was our very first publication; since 2003 Guy has published 13 books, many of which were edited, designed and/or published by the gallery.

Recently he has been experimenting with painting on the surface of his photographs, resulting in images such as the one exhibited in The Artist List that seem poised between representation and abstraction.

EXHIBITED Govan Mbeki Avenue, Gqeberha, 2021

Acrylic paint over pigment inks on Hahnemühle Baryta

BARTHÉLÉMY TOGUO

Barthélémy Toguo travelled to South Africa for Distant Relatives/Relative Distance, a 2006 curated exhibition in Green Point of six contemporary artists living and practising in the African diaspora. The show marked a watershed moment in the visibility of artists from elsewhere in Africa in local exhibition spaces. After seeing the show, Sue Williamson wrote in her ArtThrob diary:

We are really starved of seeing contemporary work from artists from other parts of the continent here, so to have a good show of six fine artists is a real treat ... At the opening, Barthélémy does a performance in which he stands inside a blue oil drum, then reaches down inside and produces a 2 litre bottle of water. To rhythmic melodic murmuring from Gabi Ngcobo – drafted minutes before the start – Toguo drains the entire bottle in one long sustained series of swallows. At the time South African art was preoccupied with its own identity politics, and until this moment our scene had little to no exposure to contemporary African art, and similarly scant relationships with the diaspora. In those early days it was vital for the gallery to introduce established African art into the dialogue, and vice versa.

When Distant Relatives/Relative Distance toured to the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg, Barthélémy restaged the performance on its opening night. His international profile rose in the years that followed and we continued to admire the work from afar until our paths crossed again, years later, and we resumed our dialogue. In May 2014 we opened Celebrations, the first of four solo shows with the gallery to date.

Over the last decade there have been many visits by different people at the gallery to his studio and art centre, Bandjoun Station, in rural Cameroon. The space was conceived by Toguo as a response to what he terms ‘the failure of cultural projects on the African continent’. One of the first institutions of its kind, the centre is a kunsthalle, townhall, artist residency, resource centre, and both an incubator of Toguo’s ideas and an extension of his practice.

EXHIBITED Dialogue with Nature (Bandjoun Station), 2023 Mosaic

PORTIA ZVAVAHERA

The Zimbabwean Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Dudziro: Interrogating the visions of religious beliefs, curated by Raphael Chikukwa, featured the work of five artists. Of all of these, Portia Zvavahera’s works on paper leapt out with their ecstatic depictions of ritual and worship. Soon after, Michael Stevenson visited Harare, where Portia’s studio was in a funeral parlour, in the corner of a back room where coffins were made; even in this context, covered with a sheet of hardboard for protection, the strength of her works, the distinctiveness of her expressive style and deep understanding of colour were evident.

Portia’s first solo exhibition with the gallery – Mavambo Erwendo (Beginning of a Profound Journey) – opened in January 2014, the subjects drawn from her life and dreams, with love, marriage and birth coming to the fore. This body of work revelled in the use of textile-like patterns created using card prints – an integration of painting and print-making that she continues to refine and develop. An exhibition in Johannesburg and a solo booth at the Joburg Art Fair followed that year, for which Portia won the FNB Art Prize, and in 2015 a solo presentation at Frieze New York brought her wider recognition.

In 2017, her fifth gallery solo followed a residency at the Gasworks in London; in 2018, work for the 10th Berlin Biennale was inspired by time spent in Bangalore. The year after, her sixth solo inaugurated our space in Parktown North, followed by a show at De 11 Lijnen in Belgium which paired her paintings with drawings by Gustav Klimt. In 2020, a small survey opened at the ICA Indian Ocean in Mauritius, then a show in the Upper Room at David Zwirner in London. Her first New York solo took place in 2021.

In 2023, Portia’s eighth exhibition with Stevenson was preceded by a triumphant return to Venice, this time as part of the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, and followed by an invitation to meet the Pope in Rome. In 2024/25 we look forward to a museum exhibition in the UK, opening at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, and travelling to the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh.

EXHIBITED Buda mumadhaka (Come out of the mud), 2023 Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on canvas

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