At the Stand, Goodman Gallery will present major new works by the gallery artists including; a new tapestry by the acclaimed artist El Anatsui alongside their current participation in “Rewilding” at Kunsthaus Baselland on view during the fair. The first glimpse of a new sculptural work “Washer” by William Kentridge, anticipating this July’s world premiere of “The Great Yes, The Great No” at the LUMA Arles alongside a substantial solo exhibition. 

Reflecting on ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’ the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale Yinka Shonibare CBE is included with a new ‘Refugee Astronaut’ seen recently at the Arsenale exhibition. A new painting will be presented by Kudzanai Chiurai from a larger, ongoing body of work centred on a speculative history where “The Union of African Nations” becomes the dominant political world power. Following Kapwani Kiwanga’s acclaimed exhibition for the Canada Pavilion new wall based works in ceramic will be presented from the artist’s recent exhibition at Fundacion Serralves, Porto. 

Featured artists: Ghada Amer, El Anatsui, Kudzanai Chiurai, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Leonardo Drew, Claire Gavronsky, Pélagie Gbaguidi, David Goldblatt, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Nicholas Hlobo, Alfredo Jaar, Remy Jungerman, William Kentridge, Kapwani Kiwanga, Atta Kwami, Laura Lima, Misheck Masamvu, Shirin Neshat, Ravelle Pillay, Faith Ringgold, Zineb Sedira, Rose Shakinovsky, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Clive van den Berg, Carrie Mae Weems and Sue Williamson.

With a career spanning five decades, El Anatsui (b. 1944, Ghana) is one of the most important contemporary artists today — awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale alongside Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat in 2017, as well as the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the Venice Biennale’s highest honour, in 2015. He was also included in TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2023. Anatsui’s Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall was on view from October 2023 to April 2024. In 2019, El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale, a major career survey curated by Okwui Enwezor, opened at Haus der Kunst and travelled to Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Kunstmuseum Bern and Guggenheim Bilbao in 2020.

Anatsui, well-known for his large-scale sculptures composed of discarded materials, transforms these simple materials into complex assemblages that create distinctive visual impact. Anatsui’s use of these materials reflects his interest in reuse, transformation, and an intrinsic desire to connect to his continent while transcending the limitations of place. His work interrogates the history of colonialism and draws connections between consumption, waste and the environment. 

Collections include: African Studies Gallery, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria; Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio; Asele Institute, Nimo, Nigeria; The British Museum, London, UK; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Jordan National Gallery of Arts, Amman, Jordan; Musée Ariana, Geneva, Switzerland; and Osaka Foundation of Culture, Osaka, Japan.

Nicholas Hlobo’s (b. 1975, South Africa) signature techniques include creating hybrid objects by intricately weaving ribbon and leather into crisply primed canvas alongside wood and rubber detritus. Uxande lwesithandathu (2023) is part of a recent shift in the artist’s practice from a minimal use of acrylic paint to a less inhibited approach, incorporating the medium with signature materials, particularly ribbon stitched into the canvas lending a sculptural feel. Each material in the work holds charged associations with cultural, gendered, sexual and national identity, creating a complex visual narrative that references ideas around post-apartheid nationhood, the self and bodily healing.

Hlobo has been featured in two major curated shows this year: Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics, curated by Dr. Zoé Whitley at The Institutum in Singapore and Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican in the UK. 

Solo museum exhibitions have been held at the Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2016); Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2010) and Tate Modern, London (2008). Hlobo has participated in several biennales including the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012), 54th Venice Biennale (2011), 6th Liverpool Biennial (2010) and 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China (2008).

Collections include: Tate Modern, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art, Savannah; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, Cape Town.

There Were No Books and The World Is Leaking are from Kentridge's new series of drawings that relate to his new theatre production in the making, titled The Great Yes, The Great No, in which the artist uses the journey of a ship from Marseille to Martinique as a prompt for unpacking power, colonialism and migration. The drawings are used as backdrops in the performance and portray imagined scenes from the boat’s arrival in Martinique - an idea of the exotic Caribbean, which is in fact the domestic garden of Kentridge’s Johannesburg studio. Densely packed vegetation is punctuated by fragments of text - phrases such as “the house of justice has collapsed” or “we want no prophets in this garden”. The phrases come from the theatre production and prompt the idea of a drawing being what you read as a text, or a text that, in this case, turns into a garden. In Kentridge’s words “How much do you glean from what you read, and how much of what you read is changed by what you’re seeing around it?”

Atta Kwami (b. 1956, Accra, Ghana, d. 2021, UK) composed works of vibrant geometric patterns that are inspired by a wide range of influences, from Ewe and Assante cloth to jazz, the tradition of mural painting and the design of street kiosks along the roads of West-African towns. Kwami is known for expanding the notions of painting, basing his practice both in the visual world of his native Ghana and in reflections on modernism.

In 2021, the year he died, he was awarded the prestigious Maria Lassnig prize, which recognised later career artists deserving wider career recognition, and, in 2022, The Serpentine unveiled the final public mural commission by Kwami, DzidzƆ kple amenuveve (Joy and Grace), which remains on view until September 2024. This Spring, the Serpentine will publish a monograph edited by Melissa Blanchflower titled Atta Kwami, with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln supported by The Maria Lassnig Foundation and marking the first publication dedicated to Kwami’s practice. 

Kwami’s work has been exhibited widely, notably creating large-scale public art commissions such as at the Folkestone Triennial in 2021 for which the artist made short-term alien interventions in the landscape. Solo exhibitions include: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (1994-1995), SOAS, University College of London (1995), Geometric Organic, National Museum Accra (1998-1999) and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2001). 

Collections include: the National Museums of Ghana and Kenya; the V&A Museum, London; British Museum, London; the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York.

Misheck Masamvu (b. 1980, Zimbabwe) is widely regarded as one of the leading figures of the Harare painting school. Trained in Germany, Masamvu continues to live and work in Zimbabwe which provides rich inspiration for his gestural painting. Cadence forms part of a new body of work that combines striking colour with a distinct expressionist style to establish a grammar of chaotic compositions, gestural brushwork and perpetually altered or mutated figures often depicted in states of flux or transformation.

Masamvu was featured in a major group show in early 2024: Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics, curated by Dr. Zoé Whitley at The Institutum in Singapore. Notable solo and group exhibitions include Inside Out, Fondation Grandpour l’Art, Geneva (2022); Witness: Afro Perspectives, El Espacio 23, Miami (2020); Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami (2020); and Two Together, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2020). Museum exhibitions and biennales include The ‘t’ is silent, 8th Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem (2022); STILL ALIVE, 5th Aichi Triennale, Aichi (2022), NIRIN, 22nd Sydney Biennale, Sydney (2020), the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016).

Collections include: Khouri Art Foundation, Dubai; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Pigozzi Collection, Geneva; Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo; X Museum, Beijing; and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town.

Ravelle Pillay (b.1993, Durban, South Africa) considers the legacies of colonialism and migration, and their subsequent hauntings and reverberations in the present. She draws from found and family photographs and the material degradation of images over time to consider agency, memory, and life-making. 

Hothouse continues the artist's exploration of what and how we remember. It taps into her interrogation of the lingering shadows of nationhood, heritage and the cycles of oppression experienced by generations of people across space and time, whose lives have been circumscribed by the dark, overt or barely noticeable incursions of colonialism. 

Pillay’s first institutional show, Idyll, opened at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2023. This followed a residency at Gasworks London at the end of 2022. Group exhibitions include: (Un)Natural : Constructed Environments at the Nasher Museum of Art (2023-2024) and Soulscapes, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2024.

Collections include: the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham.

Shirin Neshat (b. 1957, Qazvin, Iran) employs poetic imagery to engage with themes of gender and society, the individual and the collective and the dialectical relationship between past and present, all through the lens of her personal experiences of belonging and exile.

Solo exhibitions include: The Fury (2023) at Fotografiska Stockholm; Land of Dreams (2022) at The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, which later toured to SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico; a 2019 retrospective titled, Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again at The Broad, Los Angeles, which has since been exhibited at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in the US.

A major mid-career retrospective was held at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2013 as well as exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Neshat has directed three feature-length films: Land of Dreams (2021) which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017) and Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival.

Collections include: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art - Kanazawa, Kanazawa, Japan; ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States; British Museum, London, United Kingdom; Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, United States; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, United States; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, United States; Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Léon, Spain; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, United States; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, United States; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, United States; and the Yarat Contemporary Art Center, Baku, Azerbaijan

Offerings (SN376) and Offerings (SN379) form part of a larger, limited edition series of the same title. The concept is centred around the theme of wine as a catalyst for social sharing, a life force that should be “enjoyed during our brief time on earth”, in the words of the 11th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam whose poem is inscribed as calligraphy over the surfaces of female faces, hands and bodies. Neshat's iconic poetic visual language creates contrasts between the softness of the skin and the graphic nature of the text.

Faith Ringgold (b.1930, New York, USA - d. 2024, New Jersey, USA) was one of the most influential American cultural figures of her generation whose work has reflected her political activism and personal story within the context of the anti-racist and African American women’s movement.

Solo exhibitions include: Faith Ringgold: American People, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, (2023-24); Faith Ringgold: Black is beautiful, Musée National Picasso-Paris (2023); Faith Ringgold: American People, New Museum, New York (2022); Faith Ringgold, Serpentine Gallery, London (2019); Faith Ringgold: A Twenty-Five Year Survey, touring exhibition (1990-93); Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Arizona State Art Museum; Figge Art Museum, Davenport; University of Michigan Museum of Art; Women’s Center Gallery, University of California; Mills College Art Gallery, Oakland; and Tacoma Museum, Washington; and Twenty-Year Retrospective: Sculpture and Performance (1963-1984), The Studio Museum, New York. Group exhibitions include: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, The Broad, Los Angeles (2019) and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2018).

Collections include: High Museum of Art, Atlanta; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Savannah College of Art, Georgia; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City; Schomberg Library; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia

Awards and honours include: The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; two National Endowment for the Arts Awards; The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award and the Medal of Honor for Fine Arts from the National Arts Club. Ringgold received an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London (2013). Ringgold was elected as a member into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, MA (2017).

The initial idea for Refugee Astronaut, born in 2015, stemmed from the concept of space as a possible place of refuge for the human race. The work is a warning, imagining what could happen if we don’t do something about rising water levels and the displacement of people. The Refugee Astronaut is the reverse of the colonial instinct of the astronaut, it is a nomadic astronaut trying to find somewhere that is still habitable. Refugee Astronaut VI is a new version of the work on view at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s (b. 1980, Botswana) work alludes to mythology, geology and theories on the nature of the universe.You'll be sorry forms part of Sunstrum’s latest body of work that plays out the fictional narrative of a femme fatale figure who embodies the precarity, suspicion and defiance that comes with a return and desire for access. The work provides an interrogation of border politics in the geopolitical sense as well as a feeling of being on the border, an outsider, within one's immediate circumstances.

A major new solo exhibition will be opening at KM21 Den Haag on 22 June 2024 including a new large scale diptych painting within an installation that includes items from the museum's furniture collection. In September 2024 Sunstrum will be presenting the Barbican Centre's Curve gallery commission. This exhibition will be an immersive installation of paintings amongst a sculptural structure. 

Recent solo exhibitions include: The Pavillion, London Mithraeum, Bloomberg SPACE, London (2023); All my seven faces at Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati (2019); Michaelis School for the Arts at the University of Cape Town (2018); Interlochen Centre for the Arts, Interlochen (2016). Group exhibitions and biennales include: Born in Flames: Feminist Futures, The Bronx Museum of the Arts NY, USA (2021); WITNESS: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, El Espacio 23, Miami, USA (2020).

Collections include: Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Hessel Museum at Bard College, New York, A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; University of Cape Town, Cape Town; Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt; El Espacio 23, Miami; FRAC des Pays de la Loire Contemporary Collection, Carquefou; University of South Africa (UNISA) Art Collection.

Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) has focused on pioneering the insertion of queer perspectives into the larger rewrite of South African history throughout the course of his prolific forty-year career. Van den Berg has produced a range of works unified by his enduring focus on five interrelated themes: memory, light, landscape, desire and body. 

Van den Berg’s retrospective, titled Porous, will take place at the Wits Art Museum in late 2024 and be accompanied by a major new book published by Skira. 

Solo exhibitions include Remembering, a survey exhibition of paintings, prints and sculptures at the Kwa-Zulu Natal Society of Art Gallery, Durban (2021); Personal Affects, Museum of African Art, New York (2005). Major curated exhibitions include If You Look Hard Enough, You Can See Our Future: Selections of Contemporary South African Art from the Nando’s Art Collection, The African American Museum of Dallas, Dallas (2023); Breaking Down the Walls: 150 years of Art Collecting, Iziko SANG, Cape Town (2023); Screening of Memorials Without Facts: Men Loving, São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo (2018); Earth Matters: Lands as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. (2013-2014).

Collections include: El Espacio 23, Miami; Amant Foundation, New York; A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town; Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg; Spier Arts Trust, London; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington DC and Video Brasil, Sao Paulo.