This would be the Everard Read’s second attempt to enter the contemporary market; in the early 1990s, its first go-round, Everard Read Contemporary, failed to grab a foothold despite introducing controversial neo-Conceptualist Kendell Geers and influential sculptor Willem Boshoff. Geers, who lives in Belgium, is now represented in South Africa by the Goodman.

Johannesburg versus Cape Town
Along with the Goodman, Everard Read is the only South African gallery with representation in the country’s two major cities. Givon, who briefly opened a satellite branch in Cape Town in the mid-1970s, returned to the city in March last year. Situated in the up-and-coming neighborhood of Woodstock, Goodman Gallery Cape is managed by director Emma Bedford, formerly a curator at the country’s flagship art institution, Iziko South African National Gallery (ISANG) in Cape Town.

“Our artists begged us to open a branch in Cape Town because there was so little space for them there,” said Givon in an interview published last year in the Sunday Times, the country’s largest-circulation weekend paper. “In Johannesburg, there are lots of professional galleries … Cape Town has a lot of galleries, but they only really have Michael Stevenson, who is truly professional, with an international status.”

Unsurprisingly, Givon’s remarks caused a minor storm. They also prompted rivals to assert themselves more forcefully in the marketplace. Stevenson, who launched his contemporary gallery in the trendy De Waterkant district in 2003, will re-launch his operations on May 15 from a new ground-floor unit in Fairweather House, a previously abandoned factory space in Woodstock currently home to the Goodman Cape. “The new gallery will be one of the biggest commercial exhibition spaces in Africa,” Stevenson said of his new Woodstock space. “It’s a grown-up version of the current gallery.”

Unlike the Goodman space, Stevenson’s new venue will have street frontage. Also moving into the Fairweather House is Cape Town’s Bell-Roberts Gallery. The new venue will allow directors Suzette and Brendon Bell-Roberts, who have launched the careers of numerous young artists, to consolidate their activities. In recent years the gallery, which also runs a small publishing arm, has lost sculptor Brett Murray and mixed-media artist Doreen Southwood to Goodman and Stevenson, respectively.

New director for the National Gallery?
Quakes and shifts in the commercial gallery scene aside, Cape Town’s notoriously parochial art community has also been preoccupied with who will replace prominent local art administrator Marilyn Martin when she retires.

Officially, Martin is director of art collections at Iziko Museums of Cape Town, an administrative body overseeing the city’s various museums and collections; colloquially she is referred to as director of ISANG, where she is based. A public servant, Martin is required to step down from office on her 65th birthday, in June.

A former model and journalist, Martin, who holds a master’s degree in architecture, has occupied the director’s office at ISANG since 1990. During this time she has contributed to numerous publications, including The Short Century (2001), as well as co-ordinated a number of pivotal exhibitions, mostly recently “Picasso and Africa” (2006) and “Intimate Relations” (2007), a survey of Marlene Dumas’s paintings. Amid speculation about who her successor might be, the only salient fact to emerge is this: Martin’s position has yet to be publicly advertised.