Mikhael SubotzkyMassive Nerve Corpus
Goodman Gallery is pleased to present, Massive Nerve Corpus, an exhibition of provocative new paintings and works on paper by Mikhael Subotzky.
Massive Nerve Corpus continues Subotzky’s look inwards at his relationship to white masculinity. The exhibition builds on his fictional film installation, WYE (2016) in which the white male psyche is the terrain of anthropological curiosity.
In a recent interview with Hansolo Umberto Oberist, Subotzky said: “I hope that my attempts to be vulnerable and self-reflexive in this space, in these words, and in the works themselves, will contribute in some small way to the deconstruction of white masculine power, rather than reinforcing it. All around me I see amazing black artists who have been reconfiguring the canon, and I really do believe that white artists need to step up too, to take whiteness apart, and by doing so to meet them in the making of something new. I don’t think we can fully understand the exercise of white masculine power without exploring its vulnerability, both in the body and in the instruments that we’ve developed to allay this vulnerability and exercise power.”
Artworks
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Artist Bio
Mikhael Subotzky’s (b. 1981, Cape Town) works are the results of his fractured attempts to place himself in relation to the social, historical, and political narratives that surround him. As an artist working in film, video installation and photography, as well as more recently in collage and painting, Subotzky engages critically with contemporary politics of images and their making. “At the heart of my work is a fixation with revealing the gap between what is presented (and idealised) and what is hidden, coupled with a desire to pull apart and reassemble the schizophrenia of contemporary existence,” he says.
Subotzky’s first body of photographic work, 'Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners),' was an in-depth study of the South African penal system. 'Umjiegwana (The Outside)' and, 'Beaufort West' extended this investigation to the relationship between everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa and the historical, spatial, and institutional structures of control. 'Retinal Shift' was produced by Subotzky on the occasion of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2012 and toured South Africa’s major museums and critically engaged with his ambivalence towards the processes of representation and image construction. 'Ponte City,' a collaboration with artist Patrick Waterhouse, focuses on a single 54-story building that dominates the Johannesburg skyline. The building is cast as the central character in a myriad of interweaving narratives that, through photographs, commissioned texts, historical documents, and urban myths, chart the convoluted histories of both the building and Johannesburg itself. The 'Ponte City' exhibition, which consists of a single installation of thousands of photographs and documents, has been acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the accompanying publication won the 2015 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.
Subotzky’s work has been exhibited in recent museum presentations, 'The Struggle of Memory' at Palais Populaire, Berlin (2024) and, 'Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection' at Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2024).
Notable solo and two-person exhibitions include, Ponte City Book Box Project (with Patrick Waterhouse) A4 Foundation, Cape Town (2026). 'Home Building Ideas for South Africa (or A Cape Town Landscape),' Goodman Gallery Cape Town (2024); 'Epilogue,' Goodman Gallery, London (2022); 'Tell It To The Mountains,' (with Lindokuhle Sobekwa) A4 Foundation, Cape Town (2021); 'Mikhael Subotzky: WYE,' Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney (2016); 'Ponte City' (with Patrick Waterhouse), National Galleries, Scotland, UK, then travelled to Le Bal, Paris and FOMU, Antwerp (2014).
His work was included in the 12th Cairo Biennale (2010), The Unexpected Guest, Liverpool Biennial (2012), Rencontres Picha Biennale de Lubumbashi, Lubumbashi (2013) and the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World’s Futures, Venice (2015).
Public collections include SFMoMA, San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the South African National Gallery; Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki,; Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt among others.
Subotzky lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
