The Goodman Gallery is at the forefront of contemporary art in South Africa. Its focus is on artists – from South Africa, the greater African Continent, and other countries – who engage in a dialogue with the African context.
From May to July 2010, the Goodman Gallery in partnership with the Goethe-Institut, IFAS, Johannesburg City, JAG, the British Council, Nirox Foundation, Culturesfrance, the Apartheid Museum, and Galleria Continua, will present In Context, a series of exhibitions and interventions with local and international artists in Johannesburg.
Goodman News
Jodi Bieber / The Sunday Times / 8 August 2010
Full StoryFRANCES GOODMAN IN BERN
Frances Goodman will participate in Lust and Vice: The 7 Deadly Sins from Dürer to Nauman at the Z… Full Story
William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible
William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible is the first film produced by Art21 for national television broadcast outside of the biennial _Art in the Twenty-Fir… Full Story
Peekaboo – Current South Africa at Helsinki Art Museum
The Helsinki Museum is hosting Finland’s first major review of South African art. Titled Peekaboo Current South Africa , the exhibition considers the curr… Full Story
Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa since 1950
An exhibition that considers photography’s role in South Africa’s composite transformation opens at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts 21 August 2010. Title… Full Story
Joel Andrianomearisoa at Sinopale
Joel Andrianomearisoa is participating in Sinopale, the 3rd Sinop Biennale in Turkey, openi… Full Story
William Kentridge / The New York Times / 10 August 2010
Full StoryWilliam Kentridge / Mail & Guardian / 7 August 2010
Full StoryJodi Bieber / The Star / 5 August 2010
Full StoryIconic photograph by Jodi Bieber features on the cover of Time Magazine
The latest issue of US Time Magazine displays what has been referred to as its most iconic cover in decades. Goodman Gallery represented artist Jodi Bieber … Full Story
Kendell Geers / Artthrob / July 2010
Full StorySue Williamson / Cape Times / 16 July 2010
Full StoryIn Context / Le Mondial / 5 July 2010
Full StoryJodi Bieber / The New Yorker / 7 July 2010
Full StoryKathryn Smith at 2nd Moscow Biennale of Young Art
Kathryn Smith’s installation In Camera features in ‘Glob(E)scape’ for ‘Qui Vive?’, the 2nd Mosco… Full Story
Kendell Geers / Mail & Guardian / June 2010
Full StoryKendell Geers / Mail & Guardian / 25 June 2010
Full StoryKentridge to receive 26th Annual Kyoto Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Arts and Philosophy
The non-profit Inamori Foundation recently announced that William Kentridge will receive its 26th an… Full Story
Willem Boshoff / Mail & Guardian / 18 June 2010
Full StoryJenny Holzer / New York Times / 15 June 2010
Full StoryKara Walker / Sunday Times / 13 June 2010
Full StoryJodi Bieber / Mail & Guardian / 14 June 2010
Full StoryIn Context Walkabout with Orlando School Children
Grade 8 school children from Orlando, Soweto were taken on a walkabout of In Context at Arts on Main by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen and Kim Stern.
The incredi… Full Story
A grassy, rectangular church / Art South Africa / Winter 2010
Full StoryKentridge opens at Jeu de Paume and the Louvre in Paris
William Kentridge’s travelling show, Five Themes will run at Jeu de Paume – Place de la Concorde in Paris, France from 29 June 2010 – 05 September 2010 … Full Story
Rosenclaire / The Courier / June 2010
Full StoryKendell Geers in DOMINÓ CANÍBAL at Sala Verónicas
Kendell Geers’ participation in the exhibition project DOMINÓ CANÍBAL – staged solely in the 18th century convent church Sala Verónicas in Spain over a… Full Story
Kentridge's work forms part of the collection of the newly opened MAXXI in Rome
William Kentridge’s work may be seen in the permanent collection of the newly opened Museum of Art of the 21st Century – MAXXI in Rome. Designed by famed Ar… Full Story
Kudzanai Chiurai / Art Magazin / June 2010
Full StoryMikhael Subotzky / Art Magazin / June 2010
Full StoryNontsikeleo Veleko / Monopol Magazin / June 2010
Full StoryWilliam Kentridge / Frieze / June/July/August 2010
Full StoryKudzanai Chiurai / One Small Seed / June 2010
Full StoryNontsikelelo Veleko / Foam Magazine / June 2010
Full StoryDavid Goldblatt / The Jewish Museum (New York)
David Goldblatt will exhibit at The Jewish Museum (New York), from 02 May 2010 through to 19 September 2010. An exhibition of approximately 150 photographs by… Full Story
Borders at Johannesburg Art Gallery
Johannesburg Art Gallery is hosting a small-scale version of the 8th Bamako Encounters African Photographic Biennial, which took place in Mali the end of 2009… Full Story
Hasan & Husain Essop / ENJN / March/April 2010
Full StoryWilliam Kentridge / the New York Times / 22 February 2010
Full StoryRosenclaire / Artthrob / February 2010
Full StoryRosenclaire / CLASSICFEEL / April 2009
Full StoryRosenclaire / Sunday Times / April 2009
Full StoryRosenclaire / CLASSICFEEL / September 2009
Full StoryAmpersand at Daimler Contemporary
Willem Boshoff, Mikhael Subotzky, Nontsikelelo Veleko and Sue Williamson will participate in Ampersand, an exhibition of works by 16 South African and 13 in… Full Story
Kader Attia at Gwangju Biennale
Kader Attia will participate in the 2010 Gwangju Biennale, which takes place from 3 September 2010 to 11 N… Full Story
William Kentridge / The Nose
In March 2010, William Kentridge will be the first South African to direct an opera at the Metropolitan in New York, one of the premiere performance spaces in… Full Story
William Kentridge / What We See & What We Know
The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (MoMAK), is pleased to announce on the behalf of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT) and the Hiroshima C… Full Story
William Kentridge / Five Themes / MOMA (New York)
William Kentridge: Five Themes, a comprehensive survey of the artist’s oeuvre curated by Mark Rosenthal, will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art (New Yo… Full Story
Thomas Mulcaire / 'CUE' at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada
Thomas Mulcaire’s work is currently being shown on the exhibition ‘CUE’ at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada from 22 January–21 March 2010. He has been in… Full Story
Kathryn Smith and Nontsikelelo Veleko / Istanbul, Athens, Marrakech, Palermo, Catania
Kathryn Smith and Nontsikelelo Veleko will participate in Istanbul, Athens, Marrakech, Palermo, Catania at the Riso Museo d’Arte Contemporanea della Sicilia… Full Story
William Kentridge / The New York Times / 6 February 2010
Full StoryWilliam Kentridge / What We See & What We Know
Full StoryThe New York Times / The Invisible Hand in MOMA Shows / 18 February 2010
Full Story+27 21 462 7573 || cpt@goodman-gallery.com
Hank Willis Thomas / All Things Being Equal...
Goodman Gallery Cape proudly presents All Things Being Equal…, the first solo exhibition in South Africa by African-American photo conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas. Based in New York, Thomas works primarily with themes related to identity, history and popular culture.
Employing the visual language and terminology of mass media, and appropriating symbols and images from popular culture, Hank Willis Thomas’ work seeks to question and subvert established definitions and positions with regards to personal identity and the narrative of race. It is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race.
In Unbranded, a previous body of work, Thomas used images from advertisements targeting African Americans between 1968 and the present, digitally removing all products and logos from the images in order to unearth the ways in which black American identity is produced and marketed in popular culture, and to challenge viewers to ask what’s really being sold.
His B®anded series extends his interest in visual representations of race to the male African-American body, this time featuring works that deliberately use and manipulate corporate signs and logos to trace the connections between historical and contemporary commodifications of the black male body, and to examine the ways it has been employed in the service of creating wealth.
All Things Being Equal… brings together recent works by the artist that explore the legacy of slavery and colonialism, segregation and apartheid, employing subversive visual strategies to disrupt superficial notions of likeness and to find value in particularity rather than comparison.
Assuming the principle that race and blackness are radically contingent socio-cultural constructs, the exhibition addresses the idea of a particular local black experience and attempts to excavate meaning in the differences between South African and African-American blackness.
Hank Willis Thomas received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and his MFA in photography, along with an MA in visual criticism, from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Thomas has acted as a visiting professor at CCA and in the MFA programs at Maryland Institute College of Art and ICP/Bard and has lectured at Yale University, Princeton University, the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. His work has been featured in many publications including Reflections in Black (Norton, 2000) 25 under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers (CDS, 2003), 30 Americans (RFC, 2008). Thomas’ monograph, Pitch Blackness, was published by Aperture in 2008. He received a new media fellowship through the Tribeca Film Institute and was an artist in residence at John Hopkins University. He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad including Galerie Anne De Villepoix in Paris, the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.
Thomas’ work is in numerous public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Museum of Fine Art in Houston. His collaborative projects have been featured at the Sundance Film Festival and installed publicly at the Oakland International Airport, The Oakland Museum of California and the University of California, San Francisco. Recent exhibitions include Dress Codes: The International Center for Photography’s Triennial of Photography and Video, Greater New York at P.S. 1/MoMa, Contact Toronto Photography Festival and Houston Fotofest.
Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City.
02 September - 04 October 2010
Hank Willis Thomas: Hank Willis Thomas / All Things Being Equal...
+27 21 431 5197 || oneandonly@goodman-gallery.com
+27 11 788 1113 || jhb@goodman-gallery.com
Sam Nhlengethwa: Kind of Blue
In a solo exhibition of new drawings, prints and paintings at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, Sam Nhlengethwa pays homage to trumpeter and composer Miles Davis and celebrates the recent 50th anniversary of his groundbreaking album Kind of Blue. The record, which is universally known as one of the most influential and best-selling jazz albums of all time, has been as significant in South Africa as it has been everywhere else.
Described by many musicians and music-lovers as a bible – “something everybody owns” – Kind of Blue could be found in the record collections of everyone Nhlengethwa knew growing up. “When I was a youngster,” the artist reflects, “on Sundays when people were relaxing, from street to street people would sit with a portable vinyl player listening to Miles Davis.”
And, he says “unlike with the other vinyls where we picked tracks, Kind of Blue was played repeatedly from the first track, ‘So What?’ to its last track ‘Flamenco Sketches’”. With its experimental modal sketches, the album’s initial and ultimately enduring success came as a surprise to Davis and his sextet, which consisted of pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, drummer Jimmy Cobb, bassist Paul Chambers, and saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. “Evans is quoted as saying when they did the album, they had no idea it would become so important,” explains Nhlengethwa. “As a painter, I drew a parallel to that – when I make a new painting I never know how important it will be.”
Much of the musicians’ astonishment at their own success lay in the album’s commercially precarious experimentation. While Davis’s albums Milestones (1958) and 1958 Miles (1958) featured modal elements, Kind of Blue was based entirely on modality, marking a major departure from his previous albums and their highly popular hard bop style. Influenced by pianist George Russell, Davis provided each performer with a set of scales rather than a complete score, which determined the framework of their improvisation and technique. This musical process, with its focus on scales and modes, embodied what Davis famously called “a return to melody”. Recorded in only two short sessions in 1959, Davis and his sextet reached a new level of ingenuity through an eagerness to relinquish popular approaches in the quest for something new and compelling.
The universal nature of the album, its maverick edge and the significance of its 50th
anniversary prompted Nhlengethwa to devote his entire upcoming solo show to Kind of Blue; the exhibition adopting the album’s title as its namesake. Featuring a series of etchings and lithographs produced at Mark Attwood’s Artists’ Press studio in White River as well as mixed media collage drawings and paintings all the size of vinyl record covers; Nhlengethwa’s new works are stark, mostly monochromatic and affectingly vivid, echoing the emotion of Davis’s melody. Black and white rendered silhouette figures recall another era, an age when taking risks was central to cultural development. The images are – in a smooth yet sketchy technique that takes Nhlengethwa’s characteristic style to new heights – a homage to music that is urbane and transcendent, minimal yet multifaceted and ultimately pioneering.
The show will consist of over 30 mainly small scale works, as Nhlengethwa wants “the show to breathe, I don’t want it to be too cluttered”. The gallery space will, however, be infused with the modal sketches of Kind of Blue, as the album will be played on a loop for the duration of the show. This pensive, musing show will be the last of Nhlengethwa’s to focus on the theme of jazz, something he has dealt with for decades. Presenting a distinctive series, which is at times sombre and at times celebratory, Nhlengethwa’s Kind of Blue maintains a sophisticated character suited to the thematic closure he is pursuing.
Nhlengethwa was born in the mining community of Payneville in Springs in 1955 and grew up in Ratanda location in Heidelberg, east of Johannesburg. He completed a two-year Fine Art Diploma at the Rorkes Drift Art Centre in the late 1970s. While he exhibited extensively both locally and abroad throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Nhlengethwa’s travelling solo show South Africa, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow in 1993 established him at the vanguard of critical consciousness in South Africa and he went on to win the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 1994. His work has been included in key exhibitions such as Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and major publications such as Phaidon’s.
The 20th Century Art Book. He has had several solo shows in South Africa and abroad and has been a resident of the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in Newtown, Johannesburg since the 1990s where, he says, “a week never passes without me listening to Kind of Blue”.
+27 11 301 5706 || projectspace@goodman-gallery.com
Joël Andrianomearisoa / A Perfect Kind of Love
Madagascan-born and Paris-based artist Joël Andrianomearisoa will present his first
solo exhibition in South Africa – A Perfect Kind of Love – at the Goodman Gallery
Project Space at Arts on Main. The Goodman Gallery will also present a performance
by Andrianomearisoa at SA Fashion Week’s Winter 2011 Designer Collections show,
which takes place at Arts on Main in October.
A versatile artist of consummate talent, Andrianomearisoa qualified as an architect
at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. Initially drawn to the multifaceted nature
of architectural practice, Andrianomearisoa became increasingly engaged with
other modes of cultural production, pursuing a career as a couturier before shifting
his practice to the visual arts. He consequentially works across various media,
avoiding categorisation and incorporating performance, video and large-scale
installation in his work.
A Perfect Kind of Love continues Andrianomearisoa’s ongoing exploration of
eroticism and desire, his negotiations with a love of a darker kind. Love is rarely
perfect, and perfection is not always lovable, and Andrianomearisoa’s engagement
with this contradiction is what forms the raw material of the show. How does one
speak of love, or understand love in the age of reason, or amidst the cynicism of this
current moment? Romantic love is never just a private declaration or an emotional
contract between two individuals – it is a political battlefield. Sexual bodies engaging
in acts of love are at times also sites of violence, disease, moral judgment and
commodification, and are subjected to legislation, marginalisation and
criminalisation.
It is from within this context that Andrianomearisoa longingly declares Darling you can
make my dreams come true if you say you love me too, an installation consisting of
150 small wall-mounted mirrors – each a reflective dream, a yearning for the
impossible, or a plea for this world to fade and for something more beautiful and
utopian to emerge. Veering from expressions of primal, animalistic lust to whispers of
restraint and bondage, Andrianomearisoa’s installations chart an intense emotional
journey that is both autobiographically specific and universally symbolic. The work
speaks of secret, private intimacies while acknowledging other, more open and
public expressions of love and sexuality.
For Andrianomearisoa the body itself is a central aspect to a negotiation of space
and ideas within his work. The body becomes fundamental to the artist’s
deconstructivist tendencies, alluding to volatility and contained chaos. It is through
performance that Andrianomearisoa expresses this aspect of his creative intent most
poignantly. He will in this light be presenting Cut Cute at SA Fashion Week, a
performance involving several participants who will be subject to a layering of various
textiles and materials. The final “cut” of their outfits will be result of a dramatic
creative process that has been openly disclosed to the audience, offering what art
critic Virginie Andriamirado refers to as “infinite propositions”. “To build or deconstruct,
to dress or undress, to fill or empty, to wrinkle or fold, to light up or turn off-
Andrianomearisoa is situated between these opposing forces that, according to him,
combine rather than conflict. In these paradoxical connections, the works offer
infinite propostions,” states Andriamirado.
Andrianomearisoa’s work not only deconstructs modernist ideals such as “purity of
form,” and “truth to materials”, but also recalls French curator and theorist Nicolas
Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics. “I like art that allows its audience to exist in
the space opened up by it,” explains Bourriaud. “For me, art is a space of images,
objects, and human beings. Relational aesthetics is a way of considering the
productive existence of the viewer of art, the space of participation that art can
offer.” Andrianomearisoa employs this approach in his use of the body as one of the
many materials that he integrates and layers within his work, ultimately questioning
the way in which our bodies are used and manipulated in a broader context. Cut
Cute will take place on Fox street outside Arts on Main on 2 October 2010 and will act
as both a collaboration with another creative industry – fashion – as well as an
alternative platform for Andrianomearisoa’s use of the body and textiles within
performance.
Andrianomearisoa was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1977. He left
Madagascar for Paris when he was 19 in order to further his studies at the Ecole
Spéciale d’Architecture. He has participated in a number of major group exhibitions,
including Africa Remix, curated by Simon Njami, and the 2010 Sinopale Biennale in
Sinop, Turkey. His work most recently featured on In Context, hosted by Goodman
Gallery at Arts on Main and other venues in Johannesburg. He lives and works
between Antananarivo and Paris.
04 September - 16 October 2010
Joël Andrianomearisoa: Joël Andrianomearisoa / A Perfect Kind of Love
