The unseasonably cold weather didn't stop members of Guguletu dance group Indoni from delivering a spirited performance to inaugurate the new space.
The dance performance commenced with a short pre-recorded poem read by exhibiting artist Beezy Bailey, an invocation for peace through dance.
This idea of dance as replenishment is carried through to Bailey’s large canvases, many depicting dancers. One even quotes Matisse’s painting Dance of 1910.
"We seem to have forgotten, in our quest to do what is right and decent, the ancient values of art based on a spiritual ideal and an attainment of beauty," said Bailey. "I live for beauty and I attempt to create it in a world made ugly by humans."
Charles Shields, a director of the Everard Read Gallery, which is behind the new venture, opened the exhibition, which also includes a suite of linear abstract paintings made with automotive paint by Liberty Battson.
Shields managed to acknowledge his father, a former director of Everard Read who in 2006 sold his minority stake in the gallery to collector Paul Harris.
TEMPO: Ghost Dancers in the Rainlight Night (2016)
I attended the Johannesburg event to celebrate the Everard Read's new ownership structure. There were no dancers, only lengthy speeches, the last of which lingered on cricket, not art.
But then, in 2009, Mark Read, the majority owner of Everard Read Gallery, opened Circa Gallery in Rosebank. The cylindrical steel-and-concrete building, designed by studioMAS, has become a landmark.
It is has been a spur for further development, too. The new R50-million Trumpet on Keyes Avenue, a churchly mixed-use design and art precinct, neighbours on Circa Gallery.
The 2009 opening of Circa Gallery also marked a bold new phase for the Everard Read Gallery, a storied retail dealership founded in 1913 and named for Read's father.
Artists, always eager for representatives with financial muscle, have taken note.
Deborah Bell and Norman Catherine, both stalwarts of the dealer Linda Givon's Goodman Gallery in the 1990s, jumped ship for Read's transforming gallery a while ago already.
More recently, Michael MacGarry and Brett Murray have followed suit.
One of the draws of the Everard Read Gallery/Circa Gallery dealership is its broad reach. In October Bell's work inaugurated the new London branch of Circa Gallery, which is located in fashionable Kensington.
Following the opening of Circa Gallery in Cape Town's premier shopping district, near the work- in-progress Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, Read and Shields are hard at work on opening an outlet in Franschhoek.
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