Guy Simpson | Was Here

Forming part of Goodman’s newly reimagined Working Title series, which offers a year-round incubator programme for local South African artists led by Goodman curator Nandi Jakuja, Was Here is presented in the Johannesburg gallery’s viewing room space. It brings together a small but powerful group of paintings created by Simpson towards the end of 2025. Returning to Johannesburg to show in this context carries particular resonance for the artist: the school bus that took him from the suburb of Sydenham where he lived to the Jewish day school he eventually attended, King David Victory Park, passed Goodman Gallery every morning.

Born in the year that South Africa officially became a democracy, Simpson has witnessed acute examples of Johannesburg’s shifting suburban landscape: shrinking and consolidating diasporic communities; religious and ethnic enclaves tightening after extensive relocation; generational shifts in belief, belonging and identity. Growing up in Orange Grove and the bordering suburb of Sydenham – where he spent most of his school-going years – Simpson experienced these transitions first-hand. Orange Grove – its evocative name recalling the orange farms of a century ago, rather than its more recent blue-collar reality – was home to Jewish, Italian, Portuguese and Afrikaans communities, many of whom have since dispersed. In an earlier body of work, Simpson mapped this changing terrain through paintings of decaying interior and exterior walls, where peeling paint and ruptured plaster operate as inadvertent urban archives.

In this new body of work, Simpson turns from domestic interiors to the now-empty grounds of his former school, whose recent and controversial closure underscores the contraction of Johannesburg’s Jewish community. Before the site was vacated, he photographed and archived the campus, revisiting his ambivalent relationship to Jewish schooling as a way of thinking through broader shifts in the community – demographic shrinkage, increasing securitisation, and ideological divergences between schools. Although not overtly didactic, Simpson notes that such politics remain embedded in the suburbs and spaces he paints.

The resulting interior works are small, intimate studies that locate slow or quiet moments around the campus. Although they never depict the human figure, they register presence through detail: seats in the synagogue; the corner of a chalkboard; blinds in the assembly hall; and, the small yet telltale sign of Jewish presence, a mezuzah on a doorframe. These paintings are interspersed with larger works of exterior facades, which set the broader scene, as well as a series of subtly slanted compositions derived from the angled walls built along staircases and ramps throughout the school. These tilted works introduce an unexpected architectural rhythm – a sense of movement, elevation and descent – and echo the shifting ground of a place in transition.

“Brick, cracks and chipping paint act like markers of change,” Simpson reflects. “The change is visible here, and it’s not necessarily ugly. Change is unavoidable and it’s good to acknowledge that.” Complementing the paintings is a trail of sculptural shoes – three pairs, increasing in size – suggesting passage, memory and the simple act of moving through space, of passing by.