Exhibition Type: Solo Exhibition
Artist(s): Patrick de Mervelec (B. 1946 Paris, France)
Venue: SANLAM ART GALLERY
Address: 2 Strand Street, Bellville
Opening: Thursday 10 September 2026, 19:00
Exhibition End Date:16 October 2026
Description:
OPENING EVENT: Thursday 10 September at 7pm.
WALKABOUT: Saturday 12 September 11 pm – 1pm
EDUCATIONAL TALK: Saturday 3 October 11 pm – 1pm
As South Africa moves further from 1994, Foundations of Freedom invites a return to the first light of that transition: to the Government of National Unity, the birth of the Constitution, and the tentative confidence of a nation finding its footing.
De Mervelec’s position is distinctive: a French-born photographer shaped by European political upheaval who chose to make South Africa his home at the time of its rebirth. His images neither romanticise nor monumentalise; instead, they observe with compositional clarity and ethical distance. Transformation is registered through structure, through the choreography of civic life. Truth, in de Mervelec’s work, is not proclaimed – it accumulates.
Foundations of Freedom therefore offers not only a visual archive of democratic beginnings, but a meditation on how freedom took form, and how it continues to unfold.
