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Cassi Namoda || To Live Long is To See Much

21 November - 16 January 2021
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Goodman Gallery is pleased to present To live long is to see much, a new series of paintings by Cassi Namoda. The exhi-bition marks Namoda’s debut with Goodman Gallery as well as her first time exhibiting on the continent beside her native country, Mozambique.

Made during lockdown this past summer at Namoda’s home studio in East Hampton, Long Island, this body of work offers a prescient reflection on life experience, thresholds, and the passage of time in Africa. The exhibition presents a series of tableaus and various forms that weave narratives of magic realism into the verdant Mozambican landscape.

Namoda’s practice is rooted in cultural observation gained from a childhood spent growing up between Mozambique, Haiti and the United States. The result is work which incorpo-rates Namoda’s various cultural and artistic references, often drawing on images from archival photographs, memories and imagination.

Artworks

Oil and acrylic on cotton poly
Work: 152.4 x 213.4 x 3.2 cm
Unavailable
Oil and acrylic on cotton poly
Work: 121.9 x 152.2 x 2.5 cm
Unavailable
Oil and acrylic on cotton poly
Work: 121.9 x 91.4 x 2.5 cm
Unavailable
Oil and acrylic on cotton poly
Work: 101.6 x 76.2 x 2.5 cm
Unavailable
Oil and acrylic on cotton poly
Work: 121.9 x 91.4 x 2.5 cm
Unavailable
Oil and acrylic on canvas
Work: 121.9 x 152.4 x 2.5 cm
Unavailable
Oil and acrylic on cotton poly
Work: 76.2 x 101.6 x 2.5 cm
Unavailable
Oil and acrylic on cotton poly
Work: 152.4 x 233.7 x 3.2 cm
Unavailable
Oil and acrylic on cotton poly
Work: 61 x 45.7 x 2.5 cm
Unavailable
Oil and acrylic on cotton poly
Work: 101.6 x 76.2 x 2.5 cm
Unavailable
Oil and acrylic on cotton poly
Work: 101.6 x 76.2 x 2.5 cm
Unavailable

About

Cassi Namoda image

Cassi Namoda

Cassi Namoda (b. 1988) is a painter whose work transfigures the cultural mythologies and historical narratives of life in post-colonial Africa, particularly those of the artist’s native Mozambique. Namoda’s paintings are highly elusive, drawing upon literary, cinematic and architectural influences that capture the expansiveness of her specifically Luso-African vantage point. The idiosyncratic subjects who appear and reappear in Namoda’s paintings also convey this hybridity: they emerge from African indigenous religions just as much as they spring from Western mythologies. Her work borrows from an art historical canon and arises from vernacular photography in equal measure. While they appear straightforward, her images are conceptually rigorous and portray figures with complex narratives. Namoda is equally attentive to landscape, creating scenes that depict both the rural and the urban through a surreal lens. Having lived in Haiti, the United States, Kenya, Benin, Uganda and other countries, Namoda has acquired a grasp of place that is at once grounded and subversive. Her landscapes resound with the features of equatorial life – blazing suns, palm trees –but they are mythic in their representation and pleasantly impeccable – mirroring the subjects that populate them.

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