Everard Read Johannesburg
Johannesburg, gauteng
Address
6 Jellicoe Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg, gauteng, 2196
Opening Hours
South Africa's oldest commercial art gallery, specializing in contemporary painting, sculpture, and photography from a wide range of established and emerging artists.
Events at Everard Read Johannesburg
Everard Read Johannesburg
MARY SIBANDE x PALESA MOKUBUNG: SOPHIE'S CLOSET
A collaboration by Mary Sibande and Palesa Mokubung of Mantsho Sophie at the Opera — Dressed in Mantsho marks a landmark collaboration between celebrated visual artist Mary Sibande and award-winning fashion designer Palesa Mokubung, founder of Mantsho. At the heart of Sibande’s practice stands her iconic avatar, Sophie, a figure who has journeyed from the uniform of servitude into a vision of splendour and possibility. Once rooted in the humble attire of domestic service, Sophie now stands resplendent in couture, embodying the triumph of reimagined narratives and the audacity of Black women’s dreams. Sophie’s Closet presents a Mantsho collection inspired by the interplay of art and fashion, an intimate encounter with the artistry and craftsmanship that shape her world. Operatic and transformative, the collection stands as a powerful emblem of histories confronted and futures reimagined. Through this collaboration, Sophie becomes both muse and medium; a living canvas through which the dialogue between sculpture, fashion, and storytelling unfolds. Her reappearance inaugurates Sophie’s Social Calendar, a new chapter in her evolving narrative where she graces cultural spaces, private gatherings, and moments of collective imagination with commanding poise.
Everard Read Johannesburg
My Toxic Nostalgia
In My Toxic Nostalgia, Graham De Lacy turns his lens toward Johannesburg’s vanishing mine dumps - the monumental earthworks that once defined the skyline and psyche of the “City of Gold.” These images, at once elegiac and radiant, form both a personal reckoning and a social archaeology of place. De Lacy’s photographs trace a geography of memory. Growing up in Crown Mines, the artist recalls a childhood spent among these ochre mountains, sites of adventure and belonging, that in hindsight were also landscapes of toxicity and extraction. What was once perceived as a playground now reveals itself as a residue of empire: a terrain shaped by industrial greed and ecological consequence. Shot over a decade beginning in 2013, My Toxic Nostalgia captures the slow unravelling of these artificial topographies. Through a restrained yet poetic lens, De Lacy renders the dumps in soft, particulate light: their surfaces shimmering with the same golden hue that once promised fortune. In doing so, he restores to them a fragile dignity, transforming decay into a meditation on time, inheritance, and the contradictions that underpin Johannesburg’s identity. These photographs invite us to confront a dual inheritance; beauty and contamination, nostalgia and loss and to reflect on how landscapes carry the weight of both memory and forgetting. In De Lacy’s hands, the mine dump becomes more than a ruin; it is an allegory for South Africa’s modernity, built on the uneasy sediment of history.