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Proto

Name: Proto
Address: Gardens, ZA
Telephone: +27108802595

Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Proto, Gardens.

18/06/2025

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17/06/2025

Every idea is a migrant – the phrase opened Standard Deviation by Patrick Waterhouse at A4 in 2025. This publication explores the uncanny outcomes of Waterhouse’s The Unknown Masterpiece, an experiment in copying, sequencing, and playing iterative games. The artist invites a painter – one skilled in the art of reproduction –
to replicate an exact likeness of a work. With this ‘copy’ in hand he engages a new artist, delivers the same set of instructions, repeats this process in a form of painterly ‘broken telephone’. “How do you put thoughts into images in a way that helps people know that thoughts are ideologies? This can be done through putting unlike things together that shows their likeness, it can be done through subversion, or intervention. You need categorisation, but it’s also the start of all the problems, the differences... We need category to understand the world,
but category can lead to tyranny” ( , 2025). The Unknown Masterpiece maps an unscripted shift from realism to abstraction.
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The standard and special edition of our latest publication is available in-store and online now.

09/06/2025

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We are open:

Mon-Fri 10-5:30
Sat 10-2

For those not wanting to brave the cold, we are online 24/7

22/05/2025

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15/05/2025

This wall has been curated especially for A4 Arts Foundation with prints by Loft Editions.
Loft Editions is a printmaking studio established in 2023 in Cape Town by printer Georgina Berens. Loft invites artists to collaborate with us to produce quality limited-edition fine art prints.
Artists spend time working collaboratively in the studio with a printer who facilitates the technical side of the hand printing process from start to finish. Once signed by the artist, prints are published by Loft and are available for sale.
The studio is a space primed for collaboration and experimentation, constantly changing to accommodate and support the artist in residence. We love creating a studio space where artists can excel both technically and conceptually within the realm of hand printed artworks and works on paper.

03/04/2025

Evidence marks the launch of a new series of botanical prints and long-sleeved T-shirts (the latter featuring Dracaena draco and Momordica charantia) from , a project by Cynthia Fan and Hayden Malan. Their shared enquiry into botany, biology and art centres on the guiding question: What do plants really want? In parallel to this enquiry, the pair’s compositions extend reflections on the medicinal, cultural and scientific value particular to each specimen.

See you this Saturday at 11:00

19/02/2025

Build your own chair based on Enzo Mari’s project, Proposta per un’autoprogettazione (1974). Including only those elements he saw as essential for a design to carry out its purpose, Mari challenged would-be consumers to become their own furniture makers. Offering the performance of honest work as an antidote to the capitalist industrial complex, Mari encouraged reestablishing the bond of ownership between product and labourer, where participants could come to understand the means of production in practice. “It is a form of research and research can only be carried out through direct experience.” These DIY bundles are available from Proto on the occasion of Assembling Chairs in Goods at A4, which coincides with .capetown

09/01/2025

In collaboration with William Kentridge, A4 has produced a hoodie that features a sketch included in the exhibition History on One Leg, a browsable selection from the artist’s studio notebooks made over the past fifteen years, together with other tools, routes, and processes of studio work.

Limited stock available in-store now

23/02/2023

'unclear zine' is a limited edition photographic zine and poetry book created by and that was released 2nd of February in conjunction with a series of photographs prints at Youngblood Gallery.
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In February 2022, for the second time in 13 years, Lauren Westerhout, a q***r disabled performance artist, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and underwent hip to femur replacement.

Simultaneously, they began our collaboration to bring the intimate experience of disability, medical interventions and recovery into art form.
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Available in-store and online now.

21/02/2023

iconic ‘Leafball’ light is available to purchase in-store and online now.
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Galvanised steel wire, post-consumer plastic waste, cable ties; 500mm diameter, R2500

17/02/2023

On the occasion of this year’s Exhibition Match, proto~ invites painter Callan Grecia to design a limited-edition T-shirt. Sampling Y2K internet aesthetics, early-2000s streetwear, pop culture and consumer culture, Callan’s compositions reflect an “ultra-nostalgia” for the recent past; a conflation of millennials’ dreams and discontents. That football fandom is a recurring reference in Callan’s work first suggested this collaboration. Each T-shirt features the Exhibition Match logo with a custom line drawing on the front, and a reproduction from Callan’s painting included in the Cape Town Art Fair on the reverse.

Available at the match for R650. See you there!

14/02/2023

: Hypothesis 1 is the debut collaborative project from and . Their shared enquiry into botany, biology and art centres on the guiding question: “What do plants really want?” At once resisting and quoting traditions of flower arranging, the pair’s botanical compositions become a medium for spending (more) time with organic matter and listening to the non-human sentient. The plants, shifting and changing over the course of the project, insist their autonomy – some wilt, others send out aerial roots, growth and decay persist.

Cynthia Fan is a florist and PhD candidate at The University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences. Hayden Malan is a landscape architect and artist. Together, they share a preoccupation with the sculptural potential of plants as both natural organisms and modular structures.

Address

Gardens

Telephone

+27108802595

Website

facebook.com

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