Gerhard Marx is a South African artist, author, amateur botanist, and succulent horticulturalist who dissects and transforms pre-existing media and conventions. His process involves careful acts of dissection and rearrangement, allowing him to explore the poetic potential and philosophical assumptions of his chosen materials. A primary focus of his work is on the physical representation of space—what he refers to as ‘spatial imaginaries’—and how these representations influence and shape the entities they describe. Through acts of fragmentation and reassembly, he constructs alternative and deliberately complicated spatial propositions that aim to encompass multiple perspectives, coexistences, intersecting histories, and spaces that exist both within and between different realms.

Flourish I (from the series, Calligraphy and Cartography) reconfigures street maps by using the red lines that denote roads and pathways to create a map of his own landscape with strokes that resemble a calligrapher’s hand rather than a cartographer’s line. By stripping the map of its navigational purpose, he plays with structured notions of territory, repurposing cartographic pathways into abstract marks. In doing so, he gives calligraphy a cartographic context, allowing movement, place, and line to converge in a system where no body can traverse, yet the presence of the body is always suggested.