South Africa’s Stevenson Gallery will close the Johannesburg branch of the gallery after 17 years in operation. The Johannesburg gallery s last day will be December 12, according to a post on Instagram. “We are deeply grateful to every artist, collector, friend and community member who has been with us on this journey,” the gallery wrote. The gallery s locations in Cape Town (the South African city where it was founded in 2003) and Amsterdam will remain in operation.
The final exhibition in Johannesburg will be Tofo Bardi’s show of paintings and ceramics, “Underground: Nothing to Hold,” which was scheduled to be on view until January 31, but will close next Friday instead. Michael Stevenson opened his namesake gallery in Cape Town in 2003 with “Contact Zones,” a pair of exhibitions featuring colonial and contemporary art.
In 2008, the gallery opened its first Johannesburg outpost, in the Craighall Park suburb, with a show of photographs and tapestries by the South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga. The Johannesburg gallery moved to Braamfontein in 2010, and to its current location in Parktown North in 2019. Stevenson currently represents about three dozen artists, half of whom are from South Africa. Others on the roster are from elsewhere in Africa (Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Zambia, Botswana, Nigeria, Angola, and Benin are all represented) and Europe.
Some of the gallery’s best-known artists are Pieter Hugo, Edson Chagas, Paulo Nazareth, Robin Rhode, Jo Ratcliffe, and Portia Zvavahera. A 2020 Artnet article detailed Stevenson’s unusual business model, in which 13 partners collectively owned the gallery. (One of them, gallery cofounder Andrew da Conceicao, died in 2023.) This equity share model began in 2011 with five directors joining as partners. Additional partners were added two or three at a time over the following decade.
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