Sam Nhlengethwa & David KoloaneCommon Purpose
Goodman Gallery presents Common Purpose, an exhibition of works by David Koloane and Sam Nhlengethwa, two highly respected Johannesburg artists whose association with the gallery extends to the early 1990s. This two-person exhibition brings together new and historical paintings, as well as works on paper, that reflect their shared love of and longstanding engagement with jazz.
For both Koloane and Nhlengethwa, jazz has remained a recurring presence across very different periods of their practice. The exhibition includes Koloane’s Piano Player, an undated canvas recently discovered in the artist’s archive by his estate. The anonymous black performer at the centre of this work revisits a recurring presence in Koloane’s energetic drawings and etchings, a subject of admiration and even reverence. The exhibition also features a suite of drawings by Koloane from 2000, individual portraits of South African jazz legends Mackay Davashe, Jonas Gwangwa, Abdullah Ibrahim, Hugh Masekela and Sophie Mgcina.
Nhlengethwa's work similarly portrays, and thereby honours well-known jazz figures. Common Purpose includes a 2025 series of acrylic and collage works in a keynote of blue depicting, among others, Bheki Mseleku and Elvin Jones, as well as a pair of lithographs from 2021 portraying Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis. Collectively, these works monumentalise more than just the musicians portrayed, but honour the creative act itself.
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The pairing of Koloane and Nhlengethwa is important beyond their shared interest in music. The artists exhibited in alternative galleries in 1980s Johannesburg, participated in the legendary Thupelo Workshops of the early 1990s, and for decades shared working space at the Bag Factory
Studios in central Johannesburg. The title of the exhibition honours this fraternity, but also introduces an important historical awareness about the context in which they first emerged.
The meaning of the term “common purpose” is both collective and coercive. In criminal law, the doctrine of common purpose concerns the relationship between individual action and collective responsibility: the ways in which association with others can become grounds for attributing intention, participation and liability. In South Africa, this doctrine has a specific and painful history. Under apartheid, the freedom to gather, whether for political action or simply to enjoy a night of music, was itself restricted and surveilled, and association could readily be treated as evidence of common purpose in the legal sense. To be part of a group was to risk being held responsible for it. It is this charged double meaning that the exhibition holds onto.
That community had to exist inside, and often in defiance of, the same conditions that made association a legal danger. The two senses of the term were not separate. The informal common purpose of the jazz world took shape under the shadow of the formal one, and its persistence, sustaining relationships, places and forms of participation across decades of restriction, is itself part of what the exhibition asks us to see.
Seen together, the works of Koloane and Nhlengethwa make visible the persistence of particular subjects and cultural references across changing periods of practice, treating their proximity as an occasion to ask what can be carried across time, what changes in the process, and what looking again at a familiar history reveals from the position of the present. What returns across these decades, from Koloane’s musicians to Nhlengethwa’s tributes, is a way of being together with sound, memory and history: something inherited, taken up again, and made anew each time.
installation images
Artist Bio
Sam Nhlengethwa (b. 1955, Payneville, Springs) part of a pioneering generation of late 20th century South African artists whose work reflects the sociopolitical history and everyday life of their country. Through his paintings, collages and prints Nhlengethwa has depicted the evolution of Johannesburg through street life, interiors, jazz musicians and fashion.
Nhlengethwa was born in the Black township community of Payneville near Springs (a satellite mining town east of Johannesburg), in 1955 and grew up in Ratanda location in nearby Heidelberg. In the 1980s, he moved to Johannesburg where he honed his practice at the renowned Johannesburg Art Foundation under its founder Bill Ainslie. Nhlengethwa is one of the founders of the legendary Bag Factory, in Newtown, in the heart of the Johannesburg CBD, where he used to share studio space with fellow greats of this pioneering generation of South African artists, such as David Koloane and Pat Mautloa.
In 2014, a major survey exhibition, titled 'Life, Jazz and Lots of Other Things,' was hosted by SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, which was then co-hosted in Atlanta by SCAD and the Carter Center.
Nhlengethwa’s practice features in important arts publications, such as Phaidon’s The 20th Century Art Book (2001).
Other notable exhibitions and accolades in South Africa and around the world include: in 1994 – the year South Africa held its first democratic elections – Nhlengethwa was awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year award; in 1995, his work was included in the Whitechapel Gallery’s 'Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa' in London; in 2000, he participated in a two-man show at Seippel Art Gallery in Cologne.
Group exhibitions include: 'Constructions: Contemporary Art from South Africa,' Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Niteroi, Brazil (2011); 'Beyond Borders: Global Africa,' University of Michigan Museum of Art, Michigan (2018).
Biennales include: 6th Beijing Biennale in (2015); 55th Venice Biennale, as part of the South African Pavilion, titled Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive (2013); 12th International Cairo Biennale (2010); 8th Havana Biennale (2003); Southern African Stories: A Print Collection, CCA (Caribbean Contemporary Arts), Trinidad (2002).
Collections include: Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), Durban Art Gallery (DAG), Iziko South African National Art Gallery (ISANG), Standard Bank’s Head Office, Absa, Botswana Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, amongst many in South Africa and abroad.
Nhlengethwa lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Artist Bio
David Koloane (1938 – 2019) was born in Alexandra, Johannesburg, South Africa. Koloane spent his career making the world a more hospitable place for black artists during and after apartheid. Koloane achieved this through his pioneering work as an artist, writer, curator, teacher and mentor to young and established artists at a time when such vocations were restricted to white people in South Africa. A large part of this effort involved the initiatives Koloane helped establish, from the first Black Art Gallery in 1977, the Thupelo experimental workshop in 1985 and the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in 1991, where he served as director for many years. Koloane also tutored at the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) in 1979 and became the head of the fine art section and gallery from 1985 to 1990.
Through his expressive, evocative and poetic artwork, Koloane interrogated the socio-political and existential human condition, using Johannesburg as his primary subject matter. Koloane’s representations of Johannesburg are populated with images of cityscapes, townships, street life, jazz musicians, traffic jams, migration, refugees, dogs, and birds among others. Imaginatively treated, through the medium of painting, drawing, assemblage, printmaking and mixed media, Koloane’s scenes are a blend of exuberant and sombre, discernible and opaque pictorial narratives.
Koloane’s work has been widely exhibited locally and internationally. In 1999 he was part of the group exhibition, 'Liberated Voices' at the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC. In 2013, Koloane’s work was shown on the South African pavilion at the 55th la Biennale di Venezia and on the group exhibition 'My Joburg' at La Maison Rouge in Paris. In 1998, the government of the Netherlands honoured Koloane with the Prince Claus Fund Award for his contributions to South African art. Koloane was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate twice, once from Wits University in 2012, and again from Rhodes University in 2015. In 2019 Koloane was the subject of a travelling career survey exhibition, 'A Resilient Visionary: Poetic Expressions of David Koloane,' which opened at IZIKO SANG and later travelled to Standard Bank Gallery and Wits Art Museum in October.
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