EVERARD READ | EXPO CHICAGO 2025

Everard Read’s booth for EXPO CHICAGO 2025 is framed by the title ‘Third Space’ as a conversation about the role of art globally.

Hailing from a continent of diversity, we exist at the interstices between colliding cultures. Post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha dubs this a third space, where each person exists as a hybrid of influences. Atang Tshikare uses sculpture to express his identity, combining his Tswana heritage, his Sotho wife’s and the Xhosa culture of his adopted city Cape Town. 

Third spaces also lie between the domestic and work spheres. Galleries, parks, libraries, gyms can be oases for the communities they serve, fostering creative and civic engagement. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls them realms of satisfaction and social cohesion, the lack of which is felt in a post-Covid, digital world. Tafadzwa Tega and Thonton Kabeya explore the diaspora experience of communal spaces created in new home countries.

While democracy may have liberated land in South Africa, there is slippage between the thing itself and how it is understood. By complicating the visual languages used to transcribe it, Gerhard Marx shifts our understanding of place and the role we play in it. Faith XLVII’s deconstructed bank-note tapestries similarly shift our views of the complex economic systems which encircle the globe.

Our selected artworks aim to catalyze our relationship with our environment, providing sites for contention, contentment and contemplation.

Artists on the booth will be: Atang Tshikare, Andrzej Urbanski, Barbara Wildenboer, Blessing Ngobeni, Brett Charles Seiler, Brett Murray, Caryn Scrimgeour, Faith XLVII, Gerhard Marx, John Meyer, Liza Grobler, Michael MacGarry, Nic Bladen, Nigel Mullins, Philip Barlow, Ricky Dyaloyi, Tafadzwa Tega, Teresa Kutala Firmino, Thonton Kabeya, Warren Maroon

Everard Read is South Africa’s oldest gallery. Representing diverse artists with unique practices, we share their commitment to meaning-making and craft.

Everard Read has 7 distinct galleries in 4 locations. Founded in Johannesburg in 1913, it opened in the Waterfront in Cape Town in 1996. In 2009, the CIRCA building was developed in Rosebank, Johannesburg. It has been recognised as an outstanding con­tribution to local design. The London gallery launched in Chelsea in 2016. Cape Town’s second space also opened in 2016, as well as a space in Franschhoek. Everard Read at Leeu Estates opened in 2020. Its focus is on showing monumental sculpture among breath-taking fynbos and vineyards. It includes a studio and flat for an artist residency programme.

The galleries embrace work interrogating both universal and Afrocentric ideas, creating a space where insights can be mined to discern meaning in existence and encourage our better selves – or at the very least contribute to a kinder world.