Listing(s)

'[Working Title]'

Kyle Morland, Murray Kruger, Reshma Chhiba, Monique Pelser, Thabiso Sekgala, Gabrielle Goliath and Gerald Machona at Goodman Gallery Cape

Goodman Gallery Cape presents [Working Title] – a group exhibition of young artists working in South Africa, brought together in a way that allows multiple and perhaps surprising dialogues to emerge, and foregrounding questions of authorship, authority and notions of the relational.

Reshma Chhiba's Kundalini Shakti and Linga-yoni – a slashed canvas and an unsettlingly organic sculpture, both informed by the artist's ongoing interest in the Hindu goddess Kali as an embodiment of unbridled feminine creativity – act as a complement and counterpoint to the cool, Apollonian rationalism of Kyle Morland's Spool Piece – Saddle Cut No. 1, a suspended sculpture of welded steel. Both are also concerned, in different ways, with the act and effects of making. Murray Kruger, too, plays with concepts of creativity and authorship in his recreation of, and extrapolation from, Walter Battiss’ 1973 performance piece Open tent for contemplating the cosmic origins of art, while at the same time raising questions about the nature of the artwork, its evolution over time, and the ways in which its audiences are implicated in its inscription into history.

Gerald Machona’s origami-based installation Bling Bling: Blood diamonds are a girl's best friend, a cynical comment on the abuses of power in postcolonial African politics, resonates with Monique Pelser’s Conversations with my Father, a searingly intimate attempt, in an installation and set of photographs, to understand her father’s death and life in the larger context of the dark and complex history of the South African police. A solemn photographic installation by Gabrielle Goliath titled Berenice 10-28 speaks poignantly of personal issues of loss and grief, while uncompromisingly confronting questions of violence and abuse in South African society.
Thabiso Sekgala's photographs of the workers and inhabitants of a housing estate in Ghent are a refreshing and original take on the questions of identity that inform so much contemporary South African practice, and a provocative inversion of the usual dynamics of 'othering', while his stark images of domestic objects, at once intimate and abject, are a compelling reflection on contemporary urban life.

[Working Title] is a showcase of young artists whose work, while ranging in media and crossing disciplines, shares an uncommon and original approach to contemporary practice.

24 May 2012 - 30 June 2012

'Revenant'

Minnette Vari at Goodman Gallery Cape

Minnette Vári’s new body of multimedia work, on show at Goodman Gallery Cape in an exhibition entitled Revenant, features vibrant departures into relatively unfamiliar media for the artist. The exhibition engages the concept of the uncanny return – of repressed sexualities, identities, returns to earth from beyond it, and returns from beyond death itself.

Building on recent drawings that explored ancient depictions of pre-pagan female deities around the world, Vári depicts the goddess ‘Baubo’ as a narrative presence weaving together the strands of the show through various landscapes, situations, objects and interactions. Dating from the 5th Century BCE, the image of Baubo as a jesting, sexually liberated, wise woman has informed the identities and practices of many subsequent cults of worship.

21 April 2012 - 19 June 2012

'Throwing the Floor'

Lisa Brice at Goodman Gallery Cape

Goodman Gallery Cape presents an exhibition of new paintings by Lisa Brice, produced over the course of the last two years in London and featured in Vitamin P2, Phaidon's recently published anthology of painting. The paintings explore the possibilities and properties of vivid colour, how it is optically perceived, and the effects of the afterimage created by red-green vision in particular.

In her text on Brice's work in Vitamin P2, Coline Millard notes: 'Just as [Brice's] painting hovers between figuration and abstraction, her figures occupy the limbo between the living and the dead. Brice's work is all liminality.' While the liminality referred to by Millard in the Trinidad works of 2009 alludes to an inherent mysticism, the sense of liminality in this new body of paintings shifts to suggest a state of disorientation, delirium and suspended time through a heightened use of colour and reduced form.

'Throwing the Floor' is Brice's first solo exhibition in Cape Town since 2007.

10 March 2012 - 14 April 2012

'Promise Land'

Stuart Bird at Goodman Gallery Cape

Goodman Gallery presents 'Promise Land', the first solo show by artist/sculptor Stuart Bird. In a series of meticulously and often obsessively hand-crafted sculptures and installations, Bird explores the position of the artist and the individual in contemporary South Africa.

South Africa is the land of promise of the title – a country full of exciting dynamism, but, conversely a potentially dangerous and fraught land. The title also alludes to the promised land of Canaan in the Hebrew bible – a mythical place of abundance that was never quite realized. Over the Rainbow, a glittering arch constructed out of broken shards of mirror, is both a welcome and a warning – a reminder that the place to which it grants access remains a fantasy that can be visited but never inhabited. In Change, a floor sculpture spelling out the word 'struggle' in hand-carved African mahogany, coins are imbedded in the wood like bullet-holes; a violent symbol of an economic struggle barely begun.

The presence of the artist is central to the exhibition: the careful, painstaking carving of each letter and shape from a block of raw wood, and the slow and repetitive sanding and polishing of each layer and surface can be read as a kind of ritual, or perhaps an atonement – a process of coming to terms with the status quo, combining with a central desire to create a coherent object of beauty.

'Promise Land' is also about a personal struggle – a process of working through and coming to terms with the country's legacy of conflict and violence, an inheritance that we have no choice but to live with.

19 January 2012 - 25 February 2012

'Summer Show'

Various Artists at Goodman Gallery Cape

Goodman Gallery Cape's Summer Show has been designed as a review, focusing on new and recent work by South Africans artists either represented by or associated with the gallery. Important works from series produced by the artists over the past year are showcased, and the show also features a selection of works recently shown at the gallery's Johannesburg spaces.

The exhibition includes prints from Siemon Allen's Records series, in which the artist explores images of South Africa through the collection and archiving of music records from the beginning of the 20th Century to the present day. Photography is strongly represented, with works from Jodi Bieber's vibrant, urban-denizen take in her Soweto series, in marked contrast with David Goldblatt's large-scale colour prints of rural South Africa. Mikhael Subotzky (who recently won the 2012 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art) and Patrick Waterhouse show recent work from their ongoing collaboration on the Ponte City project.

A text piece by Stuart Bird is shown in anticipation of his upcoming solo show in January, Gerhard Marx presents exquisitely detailed and artisanally worked surfaces in his new works, continuing his preoccupation with notions of mapping, place and nature, and Walter Oltmann shows a powerful new addition in aluminium wire to his series of insect suit sculptures.

Paintings by Moshekwa Langa, Lisa Brice and Clive van den Berg explore abstraction and gesture in different ways; all three have produced significant bodies of new works which were well received during 2011. Minnette Vari's uncanny brush and ink drawings of the goddess/crone Baubo sit in awkward dialogue with Kendell Geers' La Sainte Vierge.

This exhibition affords a fascinating look at the output of some of South Africa’s major artists, and will also showcase from our Johannesburg spaces works not yet shown in Cape Town, including Kudzanai Chiurai's Revelations, a series of photographic tableaux exploring politics and power in Africa, new wood sculptures by Willem Boshoff, and a selection of drawings, linocut graphics and sculpture by William Kentridge.

Artists included are: Siemon Allen | Walter Battiss | Jodi Bieber | Stuart Bird | Willem Boshoff | Lisa Brice | Kudzanai Chiurai | Kendell Geers | David Goldblatt | Frances Goodman | William Kentridge | Moshekwa Langa | Gerhard Marx | Sam Nhlengethwa | Walter Oltmann | Mikhael Subotzky & Patrick Waterhouse | Clive van den Berg | Minnette Vari | Nontsikelelo Veleko

15 December 2011 - 14 January 2012