This timely retrospective of Oxfordshire-based South African painter and printmaker Gavin Jantjes (b. 1948, South Africa) is his largest solo presentation in the UK to date. It brings together more than five decades of the artist’s diverse and distinctive practice.
Through over 100 prints, drawings, and paintings, as well as archival material, the exhibition celebrates Jantjes as a significant and critical agent of change while tracing his development as a painter, printmaker, writer, curator and activist.
Structured into chapters spanning 1970 to the present, To Be Free! focuses on pivotal phases in Jantjes’s life, from his formative years in Cape Town during the early years of South African apartheid (1948–1994), his transformative role at art institutions in the UK, Germany and Norway, his compelling figurative portrayals of the global Black struggle for freedom, to his recent transition to non-figurative painting. Jantjes’ journey embodies a quest for artistic emancipation, marked by a search for an autonomous form, freed from Eurocentric traditions and expectations of Black creativity.