David Koloane

29 APRIL -27 MAY 2010.

Goodman Gallery Cape proudly presents a solo exhibition of new and recent drawings and prints by David Koloane. The exhibition foregrounds Koloane’s decades-long exploration of the bustle and frictions of the inner city of Johannesburg, where Koloane has his studio. In his work, Koloane negotiates actual and symbolic tensions between the vertical planes of high-rise buildings and the low pulse of crowd-filled streets, viewed through hazy early morning or late afternoon smog. The moods and shifts in the city’s light and landscape are represented in Koloane’s gestural marks and his colourful but earthy palette. This work lends credence to Ivor Powell’s observation that Koloane’s ‘expressive and representational realisation makes the canvas into a site of subliminally emotive suggestion as much as a representational equivalent of observed reality.’

A new body of work included on the exhibition playfully engages with the soccer mania sweeping the country. Koloane has created a series of large-scale charcoal and pastel drawings depicting a player in action – legs flailing in strong circular movements. Reminiscent of mandalas, the movement poetically captures the dynamics of the beautiful game.

David Koloane is one of the important South African artists of recent decades. His contribution to the visual arts spans criticism, curation, developmental interests and a prolific career as a practitioner. A founding member of the Bag Factory (Fordsburg Artists’ Studios) in Johannesburg, Koloane was instrumental in establishing a presence in southern Africa for the Triangle Trust, an international network of artists and arts organisations. He has exhibited widely and his work is represented in major collections including Iziko South African National Gallery, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Wits Art Galleries as well as the Botswana National Museum.

Goodman Gallery Johannesburg welcomes you to 2012 with Advance/… Notice, an exhibition of new works by a dynamic group of contemporary artists from around the world. As we advance into a new calendar year, this exhibition gives notice of innovations from some of our artists who are already familiar to you, and of our new ventures into an intellectual exchange with artists with whom we are excited to work for the first time. This show will also give audiences a preview of what is to come, as many of the featured artists have solo shows planned for 2012 at Goodman Gallery spaces and other prestigious South African institutions.
Advance/… Notice introduces newly perfected techniques or processes for some of our well-known artists, such as platinum photographic prints by David Goldblatt, and a completely new turn of direction and field of interest for African American artist Hank Willis Thomas, who first exhibited with us on In Context in 2010, as well as for Sigalit Landau, the acclaimed Israeli artist we co-hosted at last year’s Venice Biennale. These international savants are joined by South African artists such as Hasan and Husain Essop, Moshekwa Langa, Mikhael Subotzky, Sue Williamson, William Kentridge, Rosenclaire, and Frances Goodman revealing either brand new works, or works not yet seen in Johannesburg. Also featured are works by Kendell Geers, whose retrospective exhibition will open at IZIKO South African National Gallery in late March 2012.
Our first show of the year seems an apt time to introduce the novel and the unexpected in the work of a number of artists and to also welcome prominent figures including Liza Lou, a world-renowned American now living and working in KwaZulu Natal; South African Candice Breitz, now resident in Berlin; Chilean-born New Yorker Alfredo Jaar; London-based Iranian Reza Aramesh, as well as Carla Busuttil – a young South African artist based in Berlin who is well-established in the United Kingdom, but has never before exhibited in her home country.
Liza Lou presents a work titled Gather Forty, one of a series of forty individual sculptures made from gold-plated beads that have been expertly threaded onto four hundred individual pieces of stainless steel wire and bound in a sheaf – continuing the shift of the beadwork medium from craft to conceptual art. Alfredo Jaar, internationally recognised artist, filmmaker and architect, celebrated for the public interventions he has created all over the world, shows From Time to Time, a panel of nine Time magazine covers focusing on Africa that either feature animals or malnourished Africans – revealing how the rest of the world often encapsulates its second largest continent. Breitz, who opens a major survey of her work titled Extra! at the Standard Bank Gallery this February, presents The Character, a video installation filmed in Mumbai that seeks to understand the role and influence of child characters in mainstream Indian cinema through interviews with a group of young moviegoers. In Action 78, Aramesh uses familiar scenes from news footage of the first Gulf War to restage, re-present and destabilise any easy readings of the conflicts we think we understand. Oil paintings by Busuttil offer a sinisterly-executed perusal of the exploitation of power and cruelty.
We are also very pleased to present for the first time the work of Nelisiwe Xaba, who will be presenting an interactive dance and video collaboration with Mocke J van Veuren at Goodman Gallery Projects in February. The crossover into visual art is exciting new territory for this renowned performer/dancer.
Goodman Gallery hopes you will join us to be inspired, challenged and excited by this exhibition and its promise of advances in the visual arts of South Africa. We trust you will find the exhibition gives notice of an innovative and exciting programme for 2012 in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

The Joburg Art Fair was started three years ago by Artlogic with First National Bank as the primary sponsor.

It is the only art fair on the African continent and the only art fair in the world to focus on African contemporary art. Over the three year period it has become a meeting place for those interested in African contemporary art. The Joburg Art Fair is a small, boutique Fair committed to showcasing the best galleries interested in this region.

As it is the only large scale annual visual arts event in South Africa, the Fair makes an effort to give exposure to artists who work outside of the gallery circuit and routinely curate spaces for tertiary institutions, or project spaces that result from proposals submitted to Artlogic.

Each year our visitor numbers grow to include more foreigners, more students, and more of the general public interested in this kind of high-end contemporary event.

For 2011, we are working to curate a space that is welcoming and where visitors can spend an entire day. We are creating a food area that will sport four of the country’s top wine estates and a Pommery Champagne lounge in association with St Leger and Viney and Business Day Wanted Magazine.

Lisa Brice | Kudzanai Chiurai | Soly Cissé | Tom Cullberg | Claire Gavronsky | Robert Hodgins | David Koloane | Moshekwa Langa | Minnette Vári

There is an element of uncertainty inherent in the medium of paint – it is a fluid material that allows for various modes of expression, and as such is an ideal starting point for an examination of notions of nebulousness and accident.

Goodman Gallery Cape presents Open End, a group exhibition of paintings by both emerging and established artists that speaks to the element of uncertainty in artistic production and expression, and illustrates a process that seeks to arrive at meaning through search.

In an environment where so much emphasis is placed on work that is conceptually pre-determined, where the work is crafted around and invested with a deliberate and established message or meaning, the show aims to create a space for paintings produced without a clear conceptual starting point, focusing on the wrestle or the hunt for meaning rather than the expression of a packaged and determined project.

It is a simultaneously dangerous and powerful position to work from, unstable and vulnerable on the one hand, but filled with the potential of new and unexplored ideas, of work that is discursive and receptive to chance on the other. The title Open End refers not only to the absence of resolution, but to the very manner in which the work is approached: an embracing of uncertainty – or, to paraphrase Francis Bacon, a courting of accidents – in the search for meaning.

The exhibition will feature new works by Lisa Brice and David Koloane, and a painting created in situ by Kudzanai Chiurai. Tom Cullberg will show a series of abstract, perhaps metaphysical paintings dealing with the tensions that exist between the rational and the chaotic. Two anamorphic landscape-like paintings by Minnette Vári – first seen earlier this year as part of her solo show Parallax at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg – as well as several typically humorous and confrontational works by Moshekwa Langa will be included. Dakar-based artist Soly Cissé will show nine small monochrome paintings deftly straddling the figurative and the abstract, Claire Gavronsky will show an oil painting addressing notions of memory and loss, and several works by the incomparable Robert Hodgins illustrate the flex and the power of the medium.

Ryan Arenson | Walter Battiss | Deborah Bell | Justin Brett | Lisa Brice | Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin | Adam Broomberg | Kudzanai Chiurai | Marlene Dumas | Claire Gavronsky | Robert Hodgins | William Kentridge | David Koloane | Moshekwa Langa | Alexandra Makhlouf | Brett Murray | Sam Nhlengethwa | Walter Oltmann | Jonah Sack | Kathryn Smith | Jaco Spies | Clive Van Den Berg | Diane Victor | Jeremy Wafer | Sue Williamson

For many artists, drawing forms part of a larger process – a loose way of visualizing an artwork before committing to it in a more permanent medium. But the act of drawing itself remains one of the oldest and most eloquent forms of artistic expression. Goodman Gallery Cape is proud to present a group exhibition of drawings entitled ‘The Marks We Make’, exploring notions of mark-making as assertions of ownership and expressions of violence, memory and play.

Drawing usually refers to pencil marks on paper. In this exhibition we approach the term more loosely, featuring a range of media to question what constitutes a drawing and what gives it power. Works will include photographs from the Red House series by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, depicting the marks left behind by prisoners of Saddam Hussein in Iraq; wire and sculptural elements by Walter Oltmann and William Kentridge; installations by Jeremy Wafer, Jonah Sack and Justin Brett, as well as more traditional pencil, oil and charcoal drawings by Sue Williamson, Lisa Brice and Sam Nhlengethwa.

‘The Marks We Make’ brings together South African artists to explore the ways in which marks shape our environments and inform our perspectives. Bodies are circumscribed, silenced or marginalized by the invasive marks of violence. But these marks can also be used to express an identity, stake out a position or form communities. Territory is claimed, land contested, and ownership asserted through the use of marks, both physical and symbolic. The exhibition seeks to interrogate the ways in which these marks act to create the contingent, political spaces within which we form ourselves, and the role they play in shaping our personal and cultural memories.