Gerhard Marx’s new exhibition, Landscape Would Be the Wrong Word, asks us to look closer at how we see and shape the world around us. His work at Everard Read Gallery isn’t about far-off horizons. It’s about what’s right in front of us, about touch, texture, and being part of a place.
“I’m not making a landscape, I’m making a place,” Marx says. That difference lies at the heart of his work. Instead of painting what he sees, he builds spaces we could almost walk into. He folds maps, presses plants, and casts the dry earth of the Karoo into bronze.
Marx has always been fascinated by maps and how they shape our understanding of the world. By cutting and piecing them back together, he turns symbols of authority into something personal and alive. In his newer pieces, he works with dried stems and flowers such as nasturtiums, hydrangeas and poppies, arranging them into fragile constellations that feel both delicate and defiant.
His bronze works bring him even closer to the land. They lift the actual surface of the Karoo into art. These are not depictions but direct impressions, traces of a physical meeting between artist and earth.
Together, these works feel immediate and alive. They invite us to look slowly and notice how the background starts to breathe. Marx’s art reminds us that a place is not something we look at. It’s something we enter.
‘Landscape Would Be the Wrong Word’ runs until 1 November 2025 at Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg.
