10 YEARS | SUMMER 2025
9 July – 30 August 2025

This special exhibition celebrates the extraordinary artists who have brought the gallery to life over the past decade.

March 2016 marked the official opening of the first international home for Everard Read gallery’s artists and a commitment to bringing their work to the receptive and cosmopolitan audience that London offers. The city’s stature as a crossroads for art and culture endures, and over the past decade, Everard Read London has become part of the fabric of the leafy borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

For this 10th anniversary exhibition, Everard Read London has curated a collection of artworks which represent the gallery’s dynamic identity as well as the vibrant and complex art-making community that is South Africa. It includes a rich diversity of paintings and sculptures, by leading contemporary artists – some of whom the gallery has represented for many decades – as well as emerging, younger creatives.

The gallery is proud to represent an impressive stable of primarily South African artists, with diverse backgrounds, who have an authentic and considered practice and who share a commitment to contemporary story-telling and craft.

Whether meditating on everyday aspects of being human, or the big philosophical ideas of our time, Everard Read supports its artists in creating contemporary icons that help to discern meaning in the world, as well as encourage reflection, contemplation, wonder, awe – and humour.

Established in Johannesburg in 1913, the Everard Read galleries present world-class exhibition programmes, supported by the depth of knowledge accumulated over decades. Today we boast seven distinct galleries across four locations – London, Cape Town, Franschhoek and Johannesburg – shaped to accommodate the breadth of our artists’ creations and envisaged as oases for the communities they serve.

LORIENNE LOTZ | Bearing Witness
30 May – 28 June 2025

Bearing Witness, a collection of new paintings by South African artist, Lorienne Lotz, speaks to the spaces in between, it speaks to our paradoxes, it speaks to both the tenderness and brutality, and to our humor and terror.

Throughout her artistic practice, Lotz has explored oppression as a central theme, with the absurdity of the human condition forming the broader framework of her work. Her paintings intricately intertwine the political with the personal, reflecting the complexities and contradictions of our existence.

For Lotz, the world around us mirrors the deep shadows within us—the personal struggles we face with the imbalances, duplicities, and forces that shape our nature. As she explains, “The struggle to find equilibrium between opposing forces, whether in the socio-political realm or within myself, becomes the narrative that fuels my work.” Ultimately, Lotz acknowledges that there is no escaping our true selves or the ironies that arise from our deepest narratives.

CLAUDE JAMMET | Conference
30 May – 28 June 2025

For her third solo exhibition with Everard Read London, Claude Jammet focuses her attention on a collection of extraordinary birds, exquisitely rendered in oil paint on paper, mounted on canvas.

The inspiration for this new body of work came, in part, from Jammet’s reading of The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr), a 12th-century Sufi allegorical poem. The birds in the poem are on a quest to find their ideal leader and the poem is concerned with the soul’s journey toward divine truth and union with God.

Each bird represents a human fault or weakness that must be overcome on the spiritual journey. One outcome of the journey is the birds’ eventual realization that they themselves are “the Simorgh” – the divine being they seek.

Jammet’s conference of birds includes birds of prey as well as small, vulnerable birds who themselves are prey. Her works are a response to the bewildering turmoil across the globe and our search for teachers and answers.

Her exhibition is also a poignant and unsettling meditation on humanity’s sustained impact on the winged creatures with whom we share the Earth.

Artist: CLAUDE JAMMET
Artwork Title: Fallout
Medium & Dimensions: Oil on paper on canvas, 70 × 70 cm

Description:
The kākāpō, meaning “night parrot” in Māori, is a large green parrot with a distinctive owl-like face and waddling gait. They cannot fly, but they climb well. They are endemic to New Zealand and critically endangered.

Image Courtesy of artist, Claude Jammet and the Everard Read Gallery London

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