Frieze London Preview 2024
9 - 13 October
Frieze London Preview 2024
9 - 13 October
Goodman Gallery is delighted to present significant artists from the continent and its diaspora as part of Frieze London 2024. The presentation will include work by William Kentridge, following the world premiere of his latest production "The Great Yes, The Great No" at LUMA Foundation, Arles earlier this year, as well as a large-scale textile work by Brazilian artist Laura Lima following the opening of her Balé Literal show at Inhotim in August. The presentation will also include work by the late Ghanaian painter Atta Kwami whose mural has been on view at Serpentine throughout the year. On view will also be Ravelle Pillay, a rising painter from South Africa who had her solo exhibition “Idyll” at Chisenhale Gallery earlier this year. Work by Carrie Mae Weems will also be present, following her alongside her Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art exhibition “CARRIE MAE WEEMS: REMEMBER TO DREAM” on view until 1 December.
Featured artists: Ghada Amer, El Anatsui, Yto Barrada, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Leonardo Drew, Carlos Garaicoa, Claire Gavronsky, David Goldblatt, Gabrielle Goliath, Dor Guez, Remy Jungerman, William Kentridge, Atta Kwami, Laura Lima, Paul Maheke, Misheck Masamvu, Cassi Namoda, Chemu Ng'ok, Ravelle Pillay, Faith Ringgold, Rose Shakinovsky, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Mikhael Subotzky, Clive van den Berg, Carrie Mae Weems and Sue Williamson
El Anatsui
Atta Kwami
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.
Ravelle Pillay
Ravelle Pillay (b. 1993, Durban, South Africa) is a painter who 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.
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.
Pillay is the first prize recipient of the 2022 African Art Galleries Association’s Emerging Painting Invitational.
Group exhibitions include: (Un)Natural : Constructed Environments, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina (2023-2024); Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2024); Silence Calling from One Continent to Another, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2021).
Pillay lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Ravelle Pillay | In The Studio
Laura Lima
Laura Lima’s (b. 1971, Brazil) intentionally slow practice eschews manual techniques and re-engages with forms of production that suggest an earlier or alternative way of living. Her hand woven tapestries bring together found materials and involve hand dyeing processes using organic materials. In May 2023, her mid-career survey Balé Literal was presented at MACBA, Barcelona and presented a choreographed display of works to sound and music across the museum spaces.
Lima’s works are included in the collections of Instituto Inhotim, Modern Art Museum of São Paulo, Bonniers Konsthall, Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Zabludowicz Collection and the Bonnefantenmuseum.
Anhanguá is a spirit from Tupi mythology that protects animals, especially females and puppies. It usually appears as a white deer with red eyes, but can take any form. Raw cotton threads dyed by natural pigments (coffee, black tea, crajiru, turmeric, spinach, parsley, cashew leaves, porangaba, hibiscus, redwood, red beans, annatto) and steel wire
Ipupiara is a cannibalistic merman from Brazilian folklore. It would have fur and a cat's mustache, being half man, half sea lion, 3 meters long. To kill a person, it suffocates them with a hug. Female Ipupiaras would have long hair and be beautiful. Raw cotton threads dyed by natural pigments (wine, hibiscus, coffee, black tea, porangaba, spinach, parsley,crajiru, redwood, turmeric, almond tree leaves), steel wire and wood
Misheck Masamvu
Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Misheck Masamvu’s (b. 1980, Mutare, Zimbabwe) works allow him to address the past while searching for a way of being in the world. As one of the most significant artists from Zimbabwe, Masamvu’s work offers a renewed understanding of visual culture in Africa and the decolonial project more broadly. Rhythmic lines and layered fields of colour have become a prominent language for Masamvu to explore structures of power and how history comes to bear on the contemporary moment, but also how one can adapt to a new way of interacting with the world.
Masamvu's paintings propose scenes, fragmented bodies and passages built between figuration and abstraction, made from successive layers of colours that express the processes between the repressed desire for change and the access routes traced for the subjects' liberation. They affirm art as a territory for reflection and the need for constant renewal, suggesting that certain structures need to die and be set aside so that others can be born and blossom.
Misheck Masamvu | In The Studio
William Kentridge
Milk (2023) is part of an accumulation of elemental symbols within Kentridge’s broader practice. This series of bronze sculptures functions as a form of visual dictionary, giving thought to form. The sculptures are symbols and ‘glyphs’, a repertoire of everyday objects or suggested words and icons, many of which have been used repeatedly across previous projects. The glyphs can be arranged to construct sculptural sentences and rearranged to deny meaning.
William Kentridge | Milk
Pour (2022) is part of Kentridge’s ongoing Lexicon series. Acting as a visual dictionary, the sculptures form a vocabulary of symbols, or ‘glyphs’, representing a collection of everyday objects, suggested words, or icons that are ubiquitous in the artist's broader practice. Pour is the newest addition to this collection of bronzes.
Exploring and championing a breadth of mediums, such as animation, sculpture, performance and drawing, William Kentridge’s complex creations are multifaceted in form, resonating with audiences through their unifying exploration of the very fabric of our existence. Revisiting and reacting to philosophical, historical or political tropes, he conjures myriad themes in his polymorphic works which are experimental and conceptually rich.
William Kentridge | Pour
Claire Gavronsky
Claire Gavronsky (b. 1957, Johannesburg) works in a variety of mediums, most notably in painting and sculpture. Her work often uses visual references to historical paintings, and cues are sometimes taken from events from everyday life. ‘Untitled’ is part of a series of paintings by Gavronsky that focus on the atmosphere shared between women within the worlds that they build and inhabit together: intricate, subtle, complex, close, complicit, reciprocal.
Notable solo and group exhibitions include: Io e Me. Autoritratti nel Lockdown. Sala 1, Centro Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2021); Right to the Future, Museum of 20th and 21st Century Art, St Petersburg (2017); Dakar Biennale, Dakar (2010); and Dystopia, collaboration with William Kentridge, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Ghent (2009-2010).
Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953 Portland, OR, lives and works in Syracuse, New York) is considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists. Steeped in African American history, Weems’s photographs and videos explore race, family, class, and gender identity. The artist embraces activism throughout all her work—in particular, she looks to history in order to better understand the present. In the early 1990s, Weems rose to prominence with her “Kitchen Table” series: intimate black-and-white photographs that undermine tropes of African American life and womanhood as they depict the artist seated at her kitchen table alone or alongside various other characters.
Cive van den Berg
In his paintings, he delves into the porous nature of land, acting as a vessel for lived experiences and unearthing unresolved layers beneath its surface. Within Van den Berg’s practice, the landscapes serve as a departure point, transcending physicality to evoke a haunting absence that guide viewers through imagined topographies. Van den Berg's sculptural practice is equally captivating, focusing on the male form and the symbolic resonance of skin to explore themes of vulnerability and exposure. Through this vulnerability, he challenges traditional notions of masculinity and brings to light the ever-present spectre of mortality. His work serves as a poignant meditation on love, loss, and resilience.
Ghada Amer
In 'IF YOU ARE NEUTRAL’ Amer worked for the first time with an Egyptian appliqué technique that is traditionally a craft only undertaken by men. A statement by the late Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, Nobel Peace Laureate and anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu is transformed is transformed into a bold geometric composition that references ubiquitous QR codes, a contemporary visual language that has replaced printed text.
Ghada Amer | QR Codes Revisited (2023)
Gabrielle Goliath
Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath (b. 1983, South Africa) attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed remove and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, on terms of complicity, relation and love.
Goliath’s immersive, often durational installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. She has won several awards including a Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017).
Recent exhibitions include: Personal Accounts (2024), which was presented at the 60th Venice Biennale. This ongoing body of work is a transnational, decolonial, black feminist project of repair; Beloved, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); Chorus, Dallas Contemporary (2022), Dallas; This song is for…, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2022); This song is for…, Konsthall C, Stockholm (2021); Our Red Sky, Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg (2020); and The Power of my Hands, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (2020).
She has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017).
Collections include: Kunsthalle Zürich; TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum.
Goliath lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Sue Williamson
Sue Williamson (b. 1941, Lichfield, UK) emigrated with her family to South Africa in 1948. In the 1970s, Williamson started to make work which addressed social change and by the late 1980s she was well known for her series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle, titled A Few South Africans (1980s).
A major retrospective of her five-decades long career will be shown at Iziko South African National Gallery in 2025 following her UK and US institutional exhibitions in 2023 at The Box, Plymouth and The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
Postcards from Africa is a series of ink drawings based on postcards from the early 1900s, produced for residents and travellers in Africa as well as for collectors who had never set foot on the continent. These postcards, which peaked in popularity at that time, now contribute to understanding political and cultural changes in Africa as the rise of the new medium coincided with the expansion and consolidation of colonial rule. In Williamson's re-drawn scenes from these postcards, all the figures have been left out: a reference to the scourge of slavery, which saw 12.5 million people shipped from the continent to the Americas.
Williamson’s new series of drawings, Postcards from Africa, continues the artist’s interest in the power of a small printed image to carry news of a specific moment in time to a far off audience, sometimes current, sometimes separated from the event by a century. Her early series of etchings The Modderdam Postcards (1978) was based on sketches made over seven days while witnessing the destruction by the apartheid state of an informal settlement near the airport in Cape Town.
Postcards made from A Few South Africans (1983-86), mixed media portraits of heroic women active in the struggle for liberation, were distributed not only across the country but the world. Most recently, the artist has turned her attention to vintage postcards of photographs taken by European colonisers in Africa in the first decades of the 20th century, who used the postcards as examples of the success of their missions, supposedly demonstrating the civilising effect of colonisation on the colonised, or presenting views of exotic Africa.
Sourcing these postcards from museum archives or from the internet, Williamson reverts to classic drawing techniques. She dips her pen into a bottle of ink, building up images with layers of intricate cross-hatching, adding colour from a limited palette to reproduce the rural landscapes on the postcards, or capture the scenes of daily community life: harvesting, swimming, gathering wood.
Sue Williamson | Postcards from Africa, 2018 - 2024
Remy Jungerman
Remy Jungerman (b. 1959, Moengo, Suriname) explores the intersection of pattern and symbol in Surinamese Maroon culture, the larger African diaspora, and 20th century Modernism. As seen in ‘Pimba AGIDA SUSA V’ and ‘Pimba AISA (III)’, Jungerman places fragments of Maroon textiles and other materials found in the African diaspora, such as the kaolin clay used in several religious traditions, in direct contact with materials and imagery drawn from more “established” art traditions.
In 2022 Jungerman was the subject of a career survey show at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam titled Remy Jungerman: Behind the Forest. In 2019 he represented the Netherlands at the 58th Venice Biennale. Solo exhibitions include: Remy Jungerman: Higher Ground, Katonah Museum of Art, New York (2022); Measurements of Presence, 58th Venice Biennial, Dutch Pavilion (2019); In Transit, Expositieruimte 38 CC, Delft (2017); Crossing the Water, Kunstmuseum Den Haag (2015); and Desire, Zeeuws Museum, Middelburg (2008).
Collections include: JP Morgan Chase & Co, New York; International African-American Museum, Charleston; Rennie Museum, Vancouver; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague; Fenix Museum, Rotterdam; Centraal Museum, Utrecht; ABN AMRO Collection, Amsterdam; AEGON Art Collection, The Hague; and the US Embassy, Paramaribo
Remy Jungerman | Fault Lines
David Goldblatt
Renowned for a lifetime of photography exploring his home country, Goldblatt produced an unparalleled body of work within the city of Johannesburg, where he lived for 50 years. At age 17, Goldblatt would hitchhike from Randfontein, the small mining town where he was born, into Johannesburg. He walked around the city until the next morning, talking to night watchmen and following his intuition: “People would ask me what I was doing, and I would say, ’I’m poeging. I’m walking around the city; I’m learning the city, and trying to take photographs.” i This process became the foundation of his practice.
“Johannesburg”, he wrote, “is not an easy city to love. From its beginnings as a mining camp in 1886, whites did not want brown and black people living among or near them and over the years pushed them further and further from the city and its white suburbs. Like the city itself my thoughts and feelings about Joburg are fragmented. I can’t easily bring a vision or a coherent bundle of ideas to mind and say, ‘That’s Joburg for me.’ Over the years I have photographed a wide range of subjects, each was almost self-contained, a fragment of a whole that I’ve never quite grasped.”
Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold (1930-2-24) was a pioneering painter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, author, teacher and activist whose powerful works address issues of race, gender, and social justice. Ringgold’s innovative use of quilting and storytelling techniques revolutionized the art world by bridging the gap between fine art and craft traditions.
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).
Dor Guez
Dor Guez (b. Jerusalem) is a Jaffa-based artist, educator, archivist, and curator. His 2022 overview, Catastrophe, at the Museum of Modern Art Bogota, spanned a wide range of works showcasing the artist's ongoing engagement with the ever-unfolding studies of his region. Catastrophe travelled to Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City in April 2023. His more recent solo presentation Amid Imperial Grids at the Felix Nussbaum Museum extended these reflections.
Mapping connections between historical archives, photography, and performance, Guez’s photographic series mines the rich historical and mythological dimensions of Jerusalem as a site of religious and political projection. Guez’s ‘Lilies of the Field’ is composed of luminous prints of pressed floral and plant arrangements that the artist discovered in his research of the American Colony archive.
Guez’s work has been displayed in over 45 solo exhibitions worldwide including Princeton Art Museum, Princeton (2022); Kunst im Kreuzgang, Bielefeld (2021); American Colony Archive, Jerusalem (2019); MAN Museum, Nuoro (2018); DEPO, Istanbul (2017); the Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem (2017); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2016); the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015); the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2015); the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Massachusetts (2013); Artpace, San Antonio (2013); the Mosaic Rooms, Centre for Contemporary Arab Culture & Art, London (2013); the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010); and Petach Tikva Museum of Art, (2009).
Guez’s work is held in public collections including Tate Modern, London; Center Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi; The Jewish Museum, New York; Rose Art Museum, Boston; FRAC collection, Marseille; and Museum of Modern Art, Bogota.
Yto Barrada
Yto Barrada (b.1971, Paris) is a French-Moroccan artist whose work — including photography, film, sculpture, prints and installations — began by exploring her hometown, Tangier. Barrada is recognised for her multidisciplinary investigations of cultural phenomena and historical narratives. Engaging with the performativity of archival practices and public interventions, her work reinterprets social relationships, uncovers subaltern histories, and reveals the prevalence of fiction in institutionalised narratives.
Earlier this year Barrada had a solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography titled ‘Part-Time Abstractionist’ which celebrated 10 years of Barrada's investigations in abstraction in photography and film.
Barrada’s work has been exhibited at Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York), The Renaissance Society (Chicago), Witte de With (Rotterdam), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), and the 2007 and 2011 Venice Biennale.
Before his death in Larache in 1986, the French playwright Jean Genet taught his lover to reproduce his signature, so that after his death the younger man could sell his documents and manuscripts successfully. Genet's lover, Abdallah Bentaga, was a Moroccan tightrope walker. In the end, he died before Genet, a suicide. The patched and repaired layers of circus flooring in ‘Untitled (felt circus flooring, Tangier)’ reflect on both the story of Jean Genet's lover and on Barrada's recurring themes of repair and assemblage.
Barrada was the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year for 2011, after which her exhibit RIFFS toured widely. She is also the founding director of Cinémathèque de Tanger. A comprehensive monograph was published by JRP Ringier in 2013. She is a recipient of the 2013-2014 Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography (Peabody Museum at Harvard University) and was awarded the 2015 Abraaj Prize.
Paul Maheke
Paul Maheke (b. 1985, Brive-la-Gaillarde, France), across various forms and artistic disciplines, has sustained a long-term exploration into the ways that marginalised bodies, narratives and histories are made visible and invisible. Resisting a probing of identity that sits solely within the framework of identity politics, Maheke’s trajectory has continuously been channelled through spectral sensations. The artist has called in ghosts, spirits and non-human beings into his works to invite a re-orientation to the way that we, the audience, are able to perceive; which is to say, to reframe the way that we are able to see, feel and listen.
In reconfiguring the sensible, Maheke seeks to shift the dominant systems of discourse production and understanding that heavily depend on representation, visibility and legibility as the ultimate forms of truth, value and/or power. Instead, the artist nurtures the formation of a self through a state of in-betweenness; one where esoteric, spiritual, queer and embodied knowledge(s) help Maheke garner the potential for prophecy.
His work has been shown in solo presentations at Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales (2024); Kunsthalle Bratislava (2023); High Line Art, New York (2022), The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois (2021); Collection Pinault, Paris, France (2021); Chisenhale Gallery, London, England (2019); Vleeshal Centre for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, Netherlands (2018); and South London Art Gallery, London, England (2016). He has participated in group exhibitions and festivals at institutions including Tate Modern, England (2024); Rudolfinum, Prague (2023); ICA Miami, Florida (2019); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2018); and Serpentine Galleries, London, England (2016). He has been featured in major international exhibitions including Biennale du Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo (2022); Glasgow International, Scotland (2021); 58th Venice Biennale, Italy (2019); Performa, New York (2019); Baltic Triennial 13, Estonia (2018); and Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy (2018).
Maheke lives and works in Montpellier.