Beezy Bailey's 'Bring on the Dancing Trees'

Beezy Bailey

Paintings and Sculptures

Everard Read, Cape Town + The Armory Show, New York

By PETRA MASON August 29th, 2026

Beezy Bailey’s art work demonstrates an exuberant post post-modernist ‘return to truth’ – the artist's use of painterly post-impressionism, fauvism, informalism and abstraction places his practice in today's metamodernism.

Anything is grist to Beezy’s artistic mill - crowns, horses, fables, ships, birds, fairy tales, masks, wild dogs, dragon flies as well as his vibrant “Anthropocene’ meditations.  

As an artist and performer, if 2026 were the 1960s, he may well have been a Fluxus performance artist, or if it were the 1920s, he’d be part of the Dada movement (painting with a necktie in public), or if in the Middle Ages, as the court jester, in a castle. The artist has always been perfectly at home in a disrupting role.

'Bring on the Dancing Trees’ allows us to "focus on the quieter, more profound bits that lurk in the underbelly of his paintings. The bits that feel like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel that lampoons excess and the authoritarian and quietly bejewels the simple heady joy of being in the world, of being in love, of dancing in defiance" says Charles Shields, Bailey’s gallerist.

 Beezy Bailey Displaced, 2026 mixed media on canvas 75 x 60cm

Bailey has participated in Cape Town’s transformation from a refuge of the European elite into a great city with an international reputation as an art destination. Cape Town is now a city where colonial and African indigenous influences have finally been melded into a society that is evoked with pleasure by anybody fortunate enough to experience it. Its Mediterranean ambience, stormy waters and glamour is reflected in his work, as is the abundance of mountainous and scenic beauty that caters to so many visitors, immigrants and semi-immigrants from landlocked Johannesburg, Bailey’s place of birth in 1962.

Beezy is an artist who has bridged the gulf between the provincial and the international without losing a sense of identity or an appetite for invention. He accomplishes this, in part, by reinterpreting memory and placing it in a new context that becomes relevant to our harried times, reminding us to slow down and smell the flowers. And as he likes to point out, “I’m a conduit, something flows through me, a kind of dreaming, that’s still there when you wake up.”

About his vibrant 'Anthropocene’ meditations, Bailey elaborates: “We live in very dark and evil times. But, I believe that fear is the greatest evil and the ultimate cause of war. While I avoid doing illustrations of anything purposefully, or being propagandist in my art making, I rather try to assimilate negativity into positivity, as a form of creative alchemy. When I am crafting art, I think of myself as a miner of light in the dark cave of the world. Apart from issues of human displacement and war, another engine of the art I make comes from a deep concern that the Earth I grew up on is no longer. The fish and birds and insects are going, going...gone! The fight against Orwellian mediocrity, spawned in part by ai brain rot, is real and happening now. Thus, I destroy the unsatisfactory paintings and sculptures, re-painting and re- carving them until they work for me. Until they shine, I hope, like lights on black velvet. And until they dance, like stars in an endless night of love.”

Beezy Bailey Lover's in the Flowers, 2026 Mixed Media on Canvas 80 x 90cm

On abstraction: “With the majority of the paintings on show, I find myself scrutinising them as one might, after waking, analyse a dream. But for the first time ever I have included paintings in this exhibition which I decided to keep in their more abstract phase. I have increasingly realised that it isn't always necessary to push them into a figurative narrative, just because that is what I usually do. With this shift, I intend to allow the viewer to imagine their own stories and to dream.”

Making marks is an instinct. We start young. We are encouraged to paint when we are little. Then it all falls apart. We abandon attempts to communicate pictorially. We decide that we lack talent. Beezy never did that. He kept going. With over four decades of mark making behind him Beezy is able to narrate globally, in his own endlessly flexible language. His dual British and South African nationalities, combined with this ‘art passport ' gets Beezy everywhere; Past collaborations with musicians David Bowie, Dave Matthews and Brian Eno, as well as present pictorial and sculptural communications in gardens, homes, museums, landscapes and hotels London, Kenya, Rome, Florence and Umbria. Via combined efforts with the Everard Read gallery, with 'Bring on the Dancing Trees' Bailey's audience gets to garner a sense of his profound love of the world and humanity and his concerns for the dark path we seem to be on.

His landscape art and exhibition at Boughton House, one of Britain's finest historic homes, also made his mark. The result was a masterfully subversive moment in art history we peasants/the masses can get to see, thanks to YouTube. This year his Yves Blue sculptures marched across the horizon past the Duomo at the Hotel Collegio alla Querce in Florence. He did a quick landscape impression at a Castello, a cardboard combine at Villa Borghese, Rome.

After that, back to his homeland of South Africa to paint landscapes in the Cederberg and Citrusdal, then off to Kenya to the National Museum from where he sent me a photo of a taxidermy bird specimen of the Uluguru bush-shrike iridescent in regal purple. My reply - an image of Bjork on stage in Iceland in a balloon dress from Robert Wun’s 2026 'Childsplay' collection, an instantly iconic dress that looks like Beezy had designed it. The visual banter between us has been going on since the 80s when the artist, then at art school in London, wrote us weekly missives that often included sketches on the envelopes and once, a pair of nylon fluorescent pink and black zebra striped socks.

Beezy Bailey La Cuidad de Los Angeles, 2026 mixed media on canvas 200 x 150cm

Acquiring a personal vision is a lengthy business. A lot of assimilating and digesting goes on before an artist starts seeing with their own ‘mind’s eye’. Some elements and symbols Beezy has always played with: High heels for one, cats. Crowns, celestial skies. In Beezy’s lexicon high heels symbolize being human, which makes us either smart enough to have designed them or stupid enough to wear them, I can’t decide which.

Bailey’s best work may be realized slowly in solitude, self-reflecting in the studio, but he is enormously adaptable, able to create on the go, in a museum, al fresco, sometimes naked, but always wearing a Panama hat. Moroccan babouche slippers, Gucci loafers, Birkenstocks - his slip-on shoe collection deserves an article of its own.

Bailey elaborates: “I call my art-making process 'dream reality' because, unless it is a landscape or a portrait, I do my work without a pre-concept. I start by making rough marks, often using canvases as 'paint brushes' by dragging them, wet paint dripping, against each other. This makes abstract marks – similar to what one sees on the stained walls which Antoni Tàpies based his painting approach on.”

Beezy Bailey Stars on land and sky, 2026 mixed media on canvas 200 x 150cm

About his sculptures Bailey mentions his mentor the late Venda artist Nelson Mukhuba and stated:

“As with releasing the dancing figures seen in the abstract marks of my paintings, it was natural for me to discover in the pieces of wood that I carved with my chainsaw ‘dancing limbs’ to be put together then cast into bronze. A great influence on these pieces is my late mentor, the Venda artist Nelson Mukhuba. He taught me to reveal the shapes of mythical beings – humans and animals – in the branches of a tree.”

Accepting unashamedly, that he can be, as we all are, party to unconscious plagiarism Bailey enthuses:

"I am delighted to debut new sculptures of dancing figures, inspired by Matisse's painted dancers, intended (like his) to capture the joys of life, of unity and happiness. Dancing is a very cathartic process. As with the Marc Bolan lyrics "I danced myself out of the womb" - I have carried on dancing ever since – often in my studio while I paint.”

Bailey dances in the studio while he paints. Dances with his own sculptures at the foundry. Dances in Castles. Dancing at the Farmer’s Market early in the morning. His ‘dance style’ can be best described as a gumboot dance / ballet / jig / 'Jim shuffle', an evocation of his late dad, Jim Bailey, the Drum magazine publisher.

“I have often been asked to explain my spontaneous dancing at Oranjezicht City Farm Market in Cape Town especially to English people who, unlike South Africans, tend to view it as “mad, embarrassing or hilariously funny’ but I think singer Thom Yorke of Radiohead sums it up so perfectly with the lyrics of his song: This dance is like a weapon of self defence against the present, against the present tense.”

Beezy Bailey Let me taake you down cause I'm going to, 2026 mixed media on canvas 250 x 170cm

'Bring on the Dancing Trees' Beezy Bailey Solo Exhibition of paintings and sculptures Everard Read, Cape Town September 9 - 30th X New York The Armory Show September 24 - 27, 2026