Goodman Gallery Sculpture Garden at Belmond Mount Nelson

Goodman Gallery is pleased to collaborate with the Mount Nelson, A Belmond Hotel, in hosting a year-long outdoor sculpture exhibition across the hotel’s historic gardens. Bringing together works by Yinka Shonibare, Ghada Amer, William Kentridge, and Walter Oltmann, the project invites visitors to encounter contemporary sculpture through movement, proximity, and discovery. Conceived as a walk-through experience, the exhibition unfolds across the landscape, encouraging moments of pause, reflection, and return as art and environment intersect.

Yinka Shonibare’s Fabric Bronze II captures a moment of wind made solid. A hand-painted Dutch-wax pattern sweeps across a bronze form that appears to billow mid-gust, holding motion and stillness in productive tension. The work draws together references to colonial histories, global trade, and identity, while its theatrical dynamism activates the surrounding garden as a stage on which history, movement, and material converge.

Over the past two decades, sculpture has become an increasingly central component of William Kentridge’s practice, translating drawing into three dimensions and evolving from his work in animation, theatre, and film. The bronzes presented here – Branch (2021), Stroke (2022), and and further along the route, Cape Silver (2018) – explore the reciprocal relationship between line and mass, positive and negative space, light and shadow. Depicting familiar objects from domestic life alongside animals and plant forms – a branch, a stretching cat, a jug – these works echo recurring motifs in Kentridge’s visual language. Their dark patina, recalling both ink and shadow, emphasises weight and presence, underscoring sculpture as a process of giving physical substance to thought and image. 

Whilst creating his paragraphs of small glyph sculptures Kentridge realised that he wanted the glyphs to be “... seen as silhouettes, but then in the working of them they shift to being something more than extrusions, they have a much wider life.” Part of that wider life entailed selecting a few particular small glyphs to experiment what would happen to them when they were significantly larger and potentially in isolation, and key to this was to discover what would happen to Kentridge’s scribble cat were in to grow larger that life, and become what he describes as, “...the opposite of stroking a cat – the idea of when you try to stroke one, and its hair stands on end from static electricity. Mayakovsky has a character in his play ‘A Tragedy’ appeal to us to “stroke back cats, stroke back cats” catch the sparks from their fur and with that electricity and use it to run the trams the next morning. And on this larger scale it’s almost like the cat as cactus, the anti-stroke”. This medium-sized ‘Stroke’ has two faces, indicative of the feline domestic-but-wild creatures we’ve come to know, but perhaps not entirely trust. There are also the public and private faces of both the Mayakovsky who used to believe in Bolshevism and enthusiastically espouse the party line and the one who was beginning to become wholly disillusioned by Stalinist absurdities, and also, in a broader sense, the ongoing, necessary wrestling between optimism and despondency, realism and idealism that’s at the heart of all of Kentridge's performances and projected shadows.

Ghada Amer’s sculptural works extend her longstanding engagement with language, desire, and abstraction. What You Seek translates a Rumi phrase into a spherical lattice of interwoven Arabic letters, inviting viewers to encounter shifting meanings as they move around the work. Thought gathers into language, and language becomes structure. In Mexican Thoughts in White (2025) – a bronze sculpture coated in white automotive paint and volcanic stone – Amer further experiments with material and form, pushing her sculptural practice toward abstraction while retaining its conceptual grounding in transformation and inner reflection.