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From 18 January 2024
Goodman Gallery New York

Excavations places work by South African artists Clive van den Berg and the late David Goldblatt in conversation to encourage a deeper understanding of the intricate connections between the land and its structures as well as the emotional resonance of ideologies embedded within the South African terrain.

Clive van den Berg

Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Clive van den Berg

Landscape Event XI, 2023

 

Oil on canvas

Work: 100 x 70 cm (39.4 x 27.6 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Clive van den Berg

Aquifer III (Deluge), 2023

 

Oil on canvas

Work: 180 x 120 cm (70.9 x 47.2 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Clive van den Berg

Landscape Marked III, 2023

 

Oil on canvas

Work: 180 x 140 cm (70.9 x 55.1 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Clive van den Berg

Landscape Horizon V, 2023

 

Oil on canvas

Work: 150 x 120 cm (59.1 x 47.2 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Clive van den Berg

Landscape Event XIII, 2023

 

Oil on canvas

Work: 100 x 70 cm (39.4 x 27.6 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) is an artist, curator and designer, who works on his own and in collaboration with colleagues in a collective called trace, whose primary activities are the development of public projects. He has had several solo exhibitions in South Africa, and his work is regularly exhibited abroad. His public projects have included the artworks for landmark Northern Cape Legislature and, since he has joined the trace team, museum projects for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Constitution Hill, Freedom Park, the Workers Museum, The Holocaust and Genocide Centre and many other projects.

Van den Berg has much experience working on large-scale institutional projects with teams representing diverse constituencies: urban planners and policy makers, architects, landscape designers, museum curators, historians, community liaison officials and representatives of local and national governments. In the Northern Cape, for example, where he worked with the Luis Ferreira da Silva architects, he pioneered a new strategy for integrating forms of the local landscape and indigenous aesthetics into the overall building design, while also training local artisans as part of a skills transference project aimed at long-term sustainability. The result is a world-renowned and uniquely South African state edifice: a monument to the people of the Northern Cape.

David Goldblatt

Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt

Roman Catholic Church built 1985, designed by a Priest, an Italian, built by a
member of the community. Alheit Lokasie, Northern Cape. 12 December 1987 (4_5196)
, 1987

 

Silver gelatin hand print

Image: 22 x 15 cm (8.7 x 5.9 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt

The Apostolic Multiracial Church in Zion of SA. Crossroads, Cape Town.
11 October 1984 (4_3603)
, 1984

 

Silver gelatin hand print

Image: 15.8 x 20 cm (6.2 x 7.9 in.)

Frame: 42 x 41 x 3,5 cm (16.5 x 16.1 x 1.4 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt

Flushing Meadows and lightning masts, Site B, Khayelitsha, Cape Town,
11 October 1987 Structures (4_5131)
, 1987

 

Silver gelatin hand print

Image: 28 x 34.7 cm (11 x 13.7 in.)

Frame: 49 x 65 x 3,5 cm (19.3 x 25.6 x 1.4 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt

Assegais, shield, and 23-metre-high cross of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk in Afrika, (Dutch

Reformed Mission Church to Africans), which stands above Dingane’s destroyed capital, uMgungundlovu. The church was burnt down in 1985; Dinganestad, Natal. 1989 (4_6121), 1989

 

Silver gelatin hand print

Image: 34.8 x 28 cm (13.7 x 11 in.)

Frame: 57 x 50 x 3,5 cm (22.4 x 19.7 x 1.4 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt

Apostolic Faith Mission [AGS] Birchleigh, Kempton Park. 28 December 1983 (4_3258), 1983

 

Silver gelatin hand print

Image: 27.5 x 35 cm (10.8 x 13.8 in.)

Frame: 49.5 x 56.5 x 3,5 cm (19.5 x 22.2 x 1.4 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt

Dutch Reformed Church. Lothair, Transvaal. 8 January 1984 (4_3282), 1984

 

Silver gelatin hand print

Image: 27.5 x 34.8 cm (10.8 x 13.7 in.)

Frame: 50 x 57.5 x 3,5 cm (19.7 x 22.6 x 1.4 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt

South-east wing of a hostel for Black male workers erected during apartheid as part of a scheme to make Joburg city and suburbs white. Alexandra Township. 1 June 1988 (4_5388), 1988

 

Silver gelatin hand print

Image: 27.7 x 34.6 cm (10.9 x 13.6 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt

The city from the South-West, c.1960’s

 

Digital print in pigment inks on cotton rag paper

Image: 120.5 x 146 cm (47.4 x 57.5 in.)

Edition of 10

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt

Miners going home to Nyassaland after serving their twelve-month contract
on the gold mines, Mayfair railway station, Johannesburg. December 1952 (3_1212), 1952

 

Silver gelatin hand print

Image: 23.5 x 35 cm (9.3 x 13.8 in.)

Unique

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt

Travellers from KwaNdebele buying weekly season tickets at the PUTCO
bus depot in Marabastad, Pretoria (3_G5777), 1983

 

Silver gelatin print on fibre-based paper

Image: 18.5 x 28.5 cm (7.3 x 11.2 in.)

Frame: 47.7 x 61.9 cm (18.8 x 24.4 in.)

Edition of 10

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt

Novice mineworker from the Transkei, in the Fanakolo school,
Hartebeesfontein Gold Mine, Welkom (2_A55)
, 1972

 

Silver gelatin print on fibre-based paper

Image: 40 x 39,5 cm (15.7 x 15.6 in.)

Edition of 10

 

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Clive van den Berg & David Goldblatt | Excavations -  - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018) was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, South African he chronicled the people, structures and landscapes of his country from 1948, through the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the apartheid regime and into the democratic era – until his death in June, 2018. In particular, Goldblatt documented the people, landscapes and industry of the Witwatersrand, the resource-rich area in which he grew up and lived, where the local economy was based chiefly on mining. In general, Goldblatt’s subject matter spanned the whole of the country geographically and politically from sweeping landscapes of the Karoo desert, to the arduous commutes of migrant black workers, forced to live in racially segregated areas. His broadest series, which spans six decades of photography, examines how South Africans have expressed their values through the structures, physical and ideological, that they have built.

In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop, a training institution in Johannesburg, for aspiring photographers. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2001, a retrospective of his work, David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years began a tour of galleries and museums. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. He has held solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum and the New Museum, both in New York. His work was included in the exhibition ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and has featured on shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Barbican Centre in London. In 2017, Goldblatt installed a series of portraits from his photographic essay Ex-Offenders in former prisons in Birmingham and Manchester. The portraits depict men and women, from South African and the UK, at the scene of their crimes, with accompanying texts that relate the subjects’ stories in their words. In the last year of his life, two major retrospectives were opened at Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The Goldblatt Archive is held by Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Goldblatt is the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, the 2013 ICP Infinity Award and in 2016, he was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France.