Lizamore on Keyes will present The Gardener of Eden, a group exhibition featuring new work by South African artists Vusi Beauchamp, Peter Mammes and Johan Stegmann.
Opening on 29 August 2026 at the gallery in Rosebank, Johannesburg, the exhibition brings together three distinct artistic practices to explore ideas of belonging, memory, care, the natural world and humanity’s relationship with its environment.
Rather than presenting Eden as a lost or unreachable paradise, the exhibition considers whether a sense of belonging and wholeness can be created through the ways people care for one another and the world around them.
Three artists, different perspectives
The exhibition brings together artists who approach its central themes through different visual languages.
Beauchamp, Mammes and Stegmann work across recognisable and imagined figures, symbolic forms, abstraction and representations of the natural environment. Their individual approaches create different entry points into the exhibition’s broader questions about human experience and our relationship with the living world.
The works consider both personal and collective experiences, connecting questions of memory and identity with wider ideas around responsibility, renewal and care.
Rather than presenting a single interpretation of these themes, The Gardener of Eden allows the three practices to sit alongside one another and create points of connection and contrast.
Why the gardener matters
The exhibition’s title shifts the focus away from Eden itself and towards the figure responsible for tending it.
The gardener becomes a metaphor for care, patience and stewardship. It suggests that growth does not happen without attention and that things which have been neglected can potentially be restored.
This approach also changes the way the exhibition considers paradise. Instead of treating it as an ideal that exists somewhere outside the present, The Gardener of Eden asks viewers to consider how hope, belonging and responsibility can be developed within the world they already inhabit.
The idea of care therefore operates across several levels of the exhibition, from relationships between people to humanity’s relationship with the natural environment.
An exhibition about what we choose to cultivate
At its core, The Gardener of Eden considers how people respond to the world around them and what they choose to preserve, repair or develop.
The exhibition does not offer fixed answers to those questions. Instead, the works by Beauchamp, Mammes and Stegmann provide different perspectives through which visitors can consider ideas of restoration, connection and responsibility.
The Gardener of Eden opens to the public at 11:00 on 29 August 2026 at Lizamore on Keyes, 29A Keyes Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg. A preview will take place on 28 August from 16:00 to 18:00.
The exhibition brings together three artists whose different approaches offer a shared opportunity to consider how we relate to one another, the environments we inhabit and the possibility of creating a greater sense of belonging within them.
