History Doesn't Laugh
Hank Willis Thomas at Goodman GalleryHistory Doesn’t Laugh is Hank Willis Thomas’s first solo exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. The show highlights the artist’s interest in representing photographic ideas through unconventional materials.
For this exhibition, he scoured numerous publications and archives looking for graphics, images and audio that exemplify, through popular culture, South Africa’s recent history. The result is a fascinating combination of installations, objects, and prints that present the visual complexities of the not so distant past.
Thomas is debuting a series of photo-derived sculptures cast in aluminum, silicone and bronze that reframe the original image by focusing on the impact of hand gestures. In his more familiar style, he appropriates graphically striking political buttons and increases them in size to large-scale wall hangings. The show also includes screen-printed images from various magazines re-contextualised in a manner that exaggerates the hyper-reality of the time in which they were originally produced.
15 January - 15 February
