Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Lasting Influences, a group exhibition featuring selected works by historically important artists who have worked with the gallery since its founding in 1966 through to the early 2000’s. 

There is no single element that determines the lasting influence of an artist. In certain instances, this importance comes through an academic career in which the artist transfers skills and ideas to others. Other artists capture the public’s imagination with their original, unusual or controversial work. Over time these artists — the lecturer seen as too exacting and strict, the artist who achieves quick success, the controversial artist who once shocked us — shift discourse and come to cement their place in the art history of our culture. 

The selected artists all satisfy these conditions in some way or another. Their names command respect, critical acclaim, academic study, and investor interest because their legacies continue to exert influence on the audience of our time. 

Lasting Influences examines these enduring legacies by presenting important examples of the artist’s works. This includes, among others, sculptures and tapestry works by Cecil Skotnes, Edoardo Villa and Kendell Geers; drawings by Dumile Feni, William Kentridge, Walter Battiss and Ezrom Legae; as well as paintings by David Koloane, Robert Hodgins, Deborah Bell, Sam Nhlengethwa, Lisa Brice and Penny Siopis. Many of the works will be shown for the first time in decades or enjoying their first public exhibition.

The period that marks many of the exhibited works’ creation is defined in art historical terms as Modernism. However, this was also a time in which South African fine art was altered by notions of what modern Contemporary Art would become. Changes in media, materials and the rise of a more African voice in international discourse all played a part in an exciting wave of new shifts in the appreciation of art which engaged with the times, the politics, and the diversity of culture. 

Living or deceased, the artists in this exhibition have all endured as powerful visual influencers through to the present.

The Amadlozi Group

Giuseppe Cattaneo, Sydney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae, Cecily Sash, Cecil Skotnes, Edoardo Villa.

Amadlozi is an isiZulu word which translates most accurately to “the spirits of the dead”. It was adopted as the shared name by this associated group of artists as “the spirits of our ancestors”, acknowledging the shared heritage of all humankind, in our most ancient African hominid ancestry, and endorsing the idea of unity in diversity. This group of artists exhibited with private dealer Egon Guenther’s well respected Linksfield, Johannesburg gallery in the 1950’s and 60’s. Later in the 1960’s onward all of these artists exhibited with the Goodman Gallery, with group presentations in 1973, 1979, 1985 and 1987 prior to a major tour in the USA that year, exhibiting in a number of cities with the Circle Fine Arts group of galleries.

Ezrom Legae (1938 - 1999)

Ezrom Legae was a prominent South African mid-century sculptor and painter. The artist was born in Vrededorp, Johannesburg, and grew up in Soweto once apartheid legislation forced his famiy out of the city.  Legae began drawing at a young age, and went on to study at the Polly Street Art and Jubilee Art Centres under Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Kumalo. Upon Kumalo’s retirement as an educator in 1964, Legae became the art instructor at the Jubilee Art Centre, where he would later become the Co-Director.

Legae focused on documenting the everyday realities of township life, pushing his students and fellow artists to stop appealing to Western sensibilities and perceptions. Legae believed in using art to express and to preserve Black consciousness. In 1970, the artist was awarded a travel scholarship sponsored by USSALEP and visited the United States and Europe. 

Sydney Kumalo (1935 – 1988)

Sydney Kumalo was born in Sophiatown, the great melting pot district of Johannesburg in 1935, where a vibrant community thrived before apartheid laws, and saw integrated lifestyles for people who had common interests, regardless of colour and race. His family was among those forcibly removed from Sophiatown, and he was schooled at Madibane High School, Diepkloof after the family moved to Soweto. His talent saw him become a renowned and respected artist – painter and draughtsman, but sometimes nicknamed the “father of Soweto sculpture”.

Kumalo attended the Polly Street Art Centre, famed as a non-racial place of artistic learning, and was mentored by Cecil Skotnes. Kumalo and Skotnes were later colleagues at Polly Street and the Jubilee Art Centre. It was at Polly Street that Kumalo and Skotnes first met visiting gallerist Egon Guenther and were later invited to be represented by his gallery. At 20, Kumalo was offered the chance to share Villa’s studio and access the facilities to build his sculptures. Like David Koloane, Ezrom Legae, Cecil Skotnes and Bongiwe Dhlomo, Kumalo was an artist who got opportunities, commissions and support for a growing career, but also worked hard teaching and passing all he could do on to inspire the new generation of young Black South Africans who followed in his footsteps. He believed in finding an African voice for participation in the international modern and contemporary movements in art, and was determined to find ways to foster connections between African artists and counterparts abroad; but also to proudly represent African culture, tradition and histories in the wider world’s debates on image making.

From his first solo show in 1962 onward, Kumalo had works sold into museum collections from every exhibition. Kumalo won the 1960 Artist of Fame and Promise Award, and in 1981 the SA Institute of Race relations Award. He moved from the Egon Guenther Gallery to Goodman Gallery, with whom he held solo shows as well as exhibiting and travelling for shows in Europe and the USA with the Amadlozi Group. This included visiting the Grosvenor Gallery in London, where he first met Linda Goodman when she worked for its founder Eric Estorick. The Amadlozi Group had all had exposure in London with Grosvenor Gallery in the early 1960’s through Guenther.

Kumalo was introduced by Guenther, Villa, Estorick and others in England to Henry Moore and got to know his works and those of Brancusi, Marini, Hepworth, Chadwick and Caro. He was impressed with both West African and European Modernist works and influenced by these in his own flowing human figures and textured angular animal forms. Expressive figures with abstracted curved lines and mythological characters, both animal and human, from ancient oral traditions, became favoured subjects and recognisably his own work incorporating the multiple references.

Kumalo exhibited works at the Biennales of Venice (1965) and Sao Paulo (1968) and was a guest of the USSSALEP leadership exchange in New York in 1979. He visited and exhibited in Germany, on the Art Basel Fair and in a touring show in the USA with Goodman Gallery through the 1980’s. He died after a sudden brief illness in 1988, in Johannesburg. 

Cecil Skotnes (1926 - 2009) 

Cecil Skotnes was a South African artist, teacher and mentor. In 1952, Skotnes became the Cultural Relations Officer at the Polly Street Art Centre - an establishment that was situated on the border of two racially segregated suburbs. Skotnes’ mission was to encourage creativity and to nurture the talents and skills among young Black artists and artists of colour, particularly in spaces where the apartheid government had intentionally excluded creative opportunity.

Producing sculpture, printmaking, murals, installations, panels and totems, Skotnes went on to represent South Africa at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and 1968. The artist also represented the nation in several Sao Paulo Biennale exhibitions (1957, 1959, 1961, 1967 and 1971). 

Notable projects included his three-colour woodcut for a Nobel Prize portfolio in honour of South African Nobel Prize winner, Albert Luthuli, as well as his 1820 Settlers’ panels installed in the Fountain Foyer in the Monument building in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown). Skotnes was commissioned on numerous occasions for public and religious sites; both he and fellow Amadlozi Group member, Sydney Kumalo, produced unforgettable commissions for the Regina Mundi church in Soweto.

Cecil Skotnes’ contribution to South African art through the promotion of creativity and diversity resulted in his being awarded honorary degrees by the University of Cape Town, the University of Witwatersrand, and Rhodes University. In 2003, State President Thabo Mbeki presented Skotnes with a gold medal for his service to the South African nation through his contribution to the deracialisation of art.

This exhibition features  a diptych of his iconic Totems with pigments on incised wood, and the tapestry One Eyed Cat. This edition of the large scale mohair weaving by the Marguerite Stephens Tapestry Studio is based on one of Skotnes’ best known images - a woodcut print made in 1960, which has been cited as an inspiration for cats which feature in Kentridge works.

Edoardo Villa (1915 - 2011)

Italian-born, South African master sculptor Edoardo Villa’s works draw on the elements of an abstract language from the character of the surrounding natural scene, speaking convincingly of the experience of Africa. His work also explores the human form and condition, as well as the technological transformation that was overtaking modern life in the 1960s.

Villa is often referred to, as one of the most important sculptors in the South African art canon and his work is present in institutions across the country. Villa’s work beautifully expresses his uncompromising humanism in virile male presences and sensuous female figures rendered with a lover’s touch. Throughout  his artistic journey he leavened earnest themes with lightness, interspersed declamatory public statements with intimate domestic whispers. 

Villa’s use of Cubist and Constructivist techniques and his creative use of steel, exploring the possibilities of bent and welded metal, characterised his “break with descriptive conventions”. In line with Cubism, he became interested in traditional African sculpture, and a “new formal language” that appreciated the geometric forms in much African sculpture (Maurice and Dodd, 2009). During the 1960’s, Villa’s work engaged in a “dialogue between constructed steel and sculpture modeled for casting”. 

Villa’s work featured on the Sao Paolo Biennale and he had the honour of representing South Africa at the Venice Biennale multiple times. 

BELL HODGINS KENTRIDGE

Deborah Bell, Robert Hodgins & William Kentridge

These three artists had an extraordinary and fruitful collaborative relationship. Great friends with their own successful solo careers, the three all worked with print studios, Marguerite Stephens and other artists. And so, perhaps, it’s no surprise that their friendships led to the making of such print series as Hogarth in Johannesburg, Little Morals, UBU: +/- 101 but also wonderful animated films from drawings by all three artists - in digital format in Easing the Passing (of the Hours) 1992/3 and in a film noir, darkly comic suite of animated charcoal and ink drawings for Hotel, 1997.

Easing the Passing (of the Hours) is a digital film featuring a much wounded and decorated military man in a wheelchair. The character, who still seems pumped up by his Pyrrhic victories, is the source for Kentridge’s etching General (Yellow), and features in the large collaborative canvas by the same name as the video work. This three-metre wide painting and collage, made on canvas by the three artists together and signed by all three, is a wonderfully theatrical and colourful look at characters from the animation, inside a proscenium - as they might appear on a stage. Erasure marks clearly demonstrate how this work was used in making animation. The work has not been exhibited in the past 25 years and offers a rare view of the successful collaborative efforts by the three artists. 

Skotnes, Sash and Cattaneo also worked with poets such as Stephen Gray and Sinclair Beiles, with printmakers and most importantly for the first two, with tapestry weaver Marguerite Stephens who is herself a legend in South African fine art circles. Stephen’s grand mural scale, Gobelin-style loom weavings in mohair have been made with these artists over almost sixty years. Stephens has also notably worked in collaboration with Goodman Gallery artists Judith Mason, Walter Battiss, Sam Nhlengethwa and since the late 1990s, William Kentridge. 

The tapestries included in Lasting Influences are based on designs from Skotnes, Sash, Battiss and Mason

Judith Mason (1938 - 2016)

Judith Mason was a painter and graphic artist of symbolic and mythological landscapes, figures and portraits. Mason worked primarily in oils and pencil but also incorporated various graphic media and found objects into her work as well as having made a number of artist's books.

 "I paint in order to make sense of my life, to manipulate various chaotic fragments of information and impulse into some sort of order, through which I can glimpse a hint of meaning. I am an agnostic humanist possessed of religious curiosity who regards making artworks as akin to alchemy. To use inert matter on an inert surface to convey real energy and presence seems to me a magical and privileged way of living out my days," said Mason.

When thinking about tapestries and the translation of a painting into a woven form, Mason did not merely use an existing artwork as the starting point, but designed specifically with the weaving medium in mind. Marguerite Stephens served as a facilitator for Mason’s woven tapestries. Unusually, Mason did all the tasks of converting an artwork to a weaving, right up to the cartoon annotation (the last task before the actual weaving commences). Speaking about Mason’s process in the weaving studio, Stephen’s remarked: “Judith always gave her full attention to every tapestry we worked on; hers was an abnormal involvement by the artist”.

Cecily Sash (1925 - 2019)

Cecily Sash was born in Delmas , South Africa in 1925, and was the only female founding member of the Amadlozi Group of artists, who took a principled public stand against apartheid policies while working with the Egon Guenther Gallery in the 1950’s. 

Following her studies with Maurice van Essche at the art school of the Witwatersrand Technical College, Sash excelled in degree studies in London, working with Henry Moore at Chelsea Polytechnic and Victor Pasmore at the Camberwell School of Art, University of London. She returned to teach in schools and at Wits University alongside Cecil Skotnes for almost 20 years, while pursuing a successful career with her paintings, drawings, tapestry works and mosaic murals. Sash favoured a partly abstracted style of African expressionism and shared a vision for a South African artistic identity with Kumalo and Skotnes in particular. She won several large-scale public commissions and exhibited on the Sao Paulo Biennale (1963 and 1967) and the Venice Biennale of 1964. She exhibited works with her Amadlozi fellow members (Skotnes, Cattaneo, Kumalo, Legae and Villa) at the Goodman Gallery in the late 1960’s and 1972/3.

Many of the artists who have worked with Goodman Gallery have also had well known collaborations with graphic print studios and master printers over the years. Ezrom Legae, David Koloane, Cecil Skotnes, Penny Siopis, Walter Battiss, Clive van den Berg, Robert Hodgins, Walter Oltmann, Kendell Geers, Judith Mason, Sam Nhlengethwa and William Kentridge have worked successfully in various original print media with Caversham Press, The Artists’ Press, Artist Proof Studio, David Krut Projects, Ernst de Jongh Studio and LL Editions. 

Walter Battiss

Walter Battiss, aka Walter Whall Battiss (the artist’s full name), WB, WWB, BATT-155 (he often signed works with just these initials or alphanumeric key), the Gentle Anarchist (so nicknamed by biographers, curators and friends), King Ferd III of Fook Island (self-declared monarch of a fantastical island), or just King! Nothing about Battiss was commonplace or would be the same at one’s next encounter. Born in 1906 in a small Karoo town, Somerset East, this most inventive, polymath, daring, outrageous but delightful academic, mentor, teacher, artist in every medium ever thought about, writer and art historian. left a legacy which shall no doubt last into the 22nd Century.

Walter Battiss began his career as as teacher at Park school in Turffontein Johannesburg and from 1936 was art master at Pretoria Boys’ High School for almost 3 decades. He first travelled to Europe in 1938 and was an avid traveller and cultural tourist forever afterward. He once said he had begun a love affair with the art museums of the world, in Europe. His marriage to Grace Anderson, who dabbled in watercolours but was well-known as an arts education expert and theorist on linking memory and learning with visual culture, was to have a profound effect on his work, widening the scope of the artist's style, subjects and choice of mediums. Grace and Walter would live a life of tolerance, liberal principles, determined resistance to conservatism and disregard for traditional rules and mores. As his reputation as an artist grew, Battiss more frequently favoured rebelling against the expected, delivering his works with surprise, change and constant renewal.

No one recalls paintings about yoga ever appearing from the Battiss studio, but these drawings date to almost 10 months later, and one must wonder at the impossibly tangled body poses coupled with coiffed hair and smiles in the No Yes suite of drawings. Perhaps he did watch a yoga class but Battiss certainly amused himself with these drawings and would have enjoyed the story.

Walter Battiss’ final solo exhibition was at Goodman Gallery in April 1982. While on a holiday at his beach house in Leisure Bay, KwaZulu/Natal he suffered a heart attack and died in August 1982. 

Lisa Brice (b.1968)

As an artist working in Trinidad at the time of this series, Lisa Brice became a regular at the weekly gatherings of the StudioFilmClub (SFC) run by artists Peter Doig and Che Lovelace. Brice took night vision photographs during the screenings, which were later used to illustrate and record the atmosphere of the SFC nights in a catalogue printed by Walter Koenig, for an exhibition of Doig’s painted SFC posters at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Kunsthalle Zurich.

While drawing on her usual accumulation of imagery from media sources, Brice’s featured work is also informed by the hundreds of these night vision photographs. The almost monochromatic greenish palette of the night vision mode on video cameras suggests, apart from the eeriness of the desaturated colour, a sense of intrigue and an invasion of privacy.

This investigation reveals the variety of forms fear takes on. Like a shapeshifter, this fear takes forms often found in folklore, religion, film, children’s stories, politics as well as in our personal mythologies. In evoking this imagery, the work is intended to suggest a struggle in which hope and magic have the possibility of prevailing.

Brice has lived and worked in London and Trinidad for over 20 years and was Tate Britain’s Art Now guest artist in 2018, presenting a widely acclaimed exhibition of paintings curated by Aicha Mehrez. Her work was featured in the volume Vitamin P2, part of the renowned series of Phaidon publications on contemporary art.

Bongiwe Dhlomo-Mautloa (b.1956) and Kagiso Patrick Mautloa (b. 1952)

Stalwarts of the struggle for freedom and equal rights in South Africa, Bongiwe Dhlomo-Mautloa and Kagiso Patrick Mautloa have been leaders in the cultural search for equality in education, opportunity and freedom of artistic expression. Dhlomo and Mautloa, both born in KwaZulu-Natal province, met at Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre, where they graduated with diplomas in fine arts from the art school. The 1976 Soweto student uprising was a major political influence on the thinking and practice of both young artists. In a second year class, before they began dating, the student pair made the silkscreen work, Combination, 1979. The image shows a happy get-together, and its bright colours, reference to rock art, use of text and multiple layers of printing demonstrate the trend in African printmaking at that time. 

Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa is an active member of the South African arts community, working as a painter, printmaker, curator, arts administrator, mentor and patron. From the African Art Centre in the city of Durban (1980 - 83), her career has included being exhibitions curator at FUBA Gallery (Federated Union of Black Artists) where she succeeded her friend and colleague David Koloane. She also assisted in setting up an African Art Studio and exhibitions programme for  Goodman Gallery and in the late 1980’s co-founded the Alexandra Art Centre. 

Dhlomo-Mautloa later served on the projects teams for both the 1995 and 1997 Johannesburg Biennales. Her etching exhibited on Lasting Influences, Untitled (female crucifixion), 1979, occasioned much debate around the story of a young woman persecuted for becoming a Christian, stirred controversy in conservative religious circles and arguments in academic circles as to whether she was a “feminist artist”. The artist herself says she may not have known the movement at the time, nor applied the word to herself then, but knew that she wanted to see women in a more equal place in society, with a greater voice in the art of her time and that she always thought of her work in political terms. 

Dhlomo-Mautloa and husband Kagiso (known as Pat), remain involved in activism,  in mentorship, art making, serve on advisory boards and in assisting residencies, fundraising and development, especially in Alexandra, where they are respected cultural community leaders. Pat Mautloa has long been a member of the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios where he maintains his own painting, sculpture and printmaking studio, but has long been a mentor to newcomers, curated exhibitions and open studios as well as helping to host international artists’ residencies. 

Dumile Feni (1942-1991)

Zwelidumile Mgxaji Mhlaba Feni, more commonly referred to as Dumile Feni, was born in Worcester, South Africa. Upon being admitted to Sancta to be treated for tuberculosis, Feni was given materials with which to occupy himself throughout the duration of his hospital stay. Despite no formal training, newspapers and critics soon started referring to Feni as the ‘Goya of the townships.’ He went on to represent South Africa alongside other artists in the 1967 and 1973 Sao Paulo Biennale Exhibitions, where he won first prize for Drawing.

Core themes in Feni’s work arose from his infinite belief that the equality and the culture of South Africa were inseparable from the struggle for liberation. In 1960, he was incarcerated for the first time by the South African regime as his art, in both form and content, was regarded as a threat to the interests of the state. 

Although he was later exiled from the nation by the apartheid government, Feni set up learning opportunities with Bill Ainslie within the country for individuals living in the townships, making it possible for them to keep records of cultural information. The artist’s work continued to contribute to the movement in the struggle against apartheid after his exile. Notably, Feni participated in the 25th Anniversary of the Freedom Charter - commemorated by the United Nations in 1980.

Taking J. M. Coetzee’s novel of the same title, a startling allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed, Geers’ large scale sculpture presents as a kind of anti-monument to the innumerable divisions within this world which separate and have separated spaces and people, as well as how they have drawn and continue to draw them into countless conflicts.  Geers’ signature use of Razormesh localises this narrative. 

“Razormesh and security fencing mark our suburban lives in South Africa, protecting us from hidden nameless enemies banging at our gates. We live in compounds imprisoned by our desire to be free and safe within a space etched out from the environment by razorblades and electric fences. The world patent for Razormesh remains in the hands of a South African corporation and it is our unique product, a cultural weapon exported to every single political flash point on the planet, an economic success story that cut its teeth in our dark history … [the] work is a meditation upon my personal cultural heritage, my roots and in reflection upon my community, a modern unspoken heritage, a cultural icon that we are blinded to.” – Kendell Geers

David Goldblatt (1930 - 2018)

David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein, South Africa and from the early 1960s, devoted all of his time to photography. In 1989 Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg, with, he explains “the object of teaching visual literacy and photographic skills to young people, with particular emphasis on those disadvantaged by apartheid”. In 1998 he was the first South African to be given a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Goldblatt received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town in 2001. In that same year a retrospective exhibition, David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years, opened in Barcelona, and later travelled to galleries and museums around the world.  His work was represented at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. Goldblatt received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2008.

Goldblatt and the late Nobel Laureate for Literature, Nadine Gordimer, collaborated to examine the human and political dimensions of mining in South Africa, and the photographs and texts were published as the acclaimed book On the Mines. In another collaboration, with writer Ivan Vladislavic, Goldblatt published TJ/Double Negative, with his photographs of close observations of street life in the city of Johannesburg accompanying the novel by the writer, dealing with the denizens of the city witnessed by a photographer.

Robert Hodgins (1920 - 2010)

Robert Hodgins was born in London’s Dulwich, to a single mother in poor circumstances. He had a hard childhood, and sometimes without shoes would escape the cold and wet weather by visiting the National Gallery where some of the attendants, seeing his plight sympathetically, would let him linger and even talk to him about paintings he liked. He often credited those times with lighting a fire in him for painting. In 1938 he emigrated to Cape Town helped by a great uncle who saw to it that the young man could buy a suit, and a passage to South Africa to take up work as an insurance clerk. He took to life above the Harbour Cafe, and spent his wages on weekend carousing, enjoying a new sense of independence. 

Deborah Bell  (b.1957) 

Deborah Bell is a graduate of the University of Witwatersrand where she was a painting student of Robert Hodgins, then senior lecturer in painting, and a contemporary of William Kentridge. She is known for works in drawing, sculpture and has long enjoyed the processes of etching and lithography, and engages with the alchemy of ink, paper, pencils, charcoal and oils. 

Bell’s conceptual concerns refer to classical history, mysticism, goddesses and her place in ancient and contemporary Africa and the ancestral connections between the two. 

The subject of the painting Morphing for Herod (1993 to 2017) refers to the dance of Salome, for the biblical King Herod, but also refers to Bell’s own love of dancing with longtime friend and mentor, Robert Hodgins. In fact as the texts and inscriptions on the verso testify, it was Hodgins who began painting this canvas of the moving, morphing, nude dancer across the surface of the canvas, in 1993. He later signed, dated and titled the work on the reverse, and gave the painting to Deborah Bell as a gift. When it was later damaged in storage she undertook to restore the surface image, but only finished this renewed image of the dancer and a suited “Herod” in 2017. After Hodgins’ death in 2010, Bell found it very challenging to work on two oils left incomplete by her late friend who requested she consider completing them in her own way, as they would do in collaborative works of the past. Only once she had found her way into those images and contented herself that they felt right, did she eventually return to this work gifted by Hodgins and which is now a collaborative work from both artists.

William Kentridge (b. 1955)

William Kentridge's artistic practice, expressionist in nature, is entirely underpinned by drawing.  He is perhaps best known for his series of eleven animated films, Drawings for Projection, the earliest of which was completed in 1989 and the most recent, City Deep, had its premiere in 2020.  These hand-drawn films follow the narrative of fictional mining magnate, Soho Eckstein, his wife and her lover, Felix Teitlebaum.  This saga is permeated with anecdotal elements from Kentridge's own life and the political events which unfolded in South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy.

Kentridge is currently working towards a major exhibition at The Royal Academy in London. The exhibition will present a sweeping view across Kentridge’s forty-year career, featuring rarely seen works from the 1980s up to the present day, as well as newly created works. Charcoal drawings, animated films, mechanical theatre, sculpture, tapestry and large-scale performance pieces will be spread through a total of twelve individually themed galleries. The exhibition will be the most significant presentation of Kentridge’s work in the United Kingdom.

David Koloane (1938 - 2019)

David Koloane was born in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra and later lived in Soweto. The evidence of this immersion in the urban sprawl and challenges of existence in Johannesburg’s largest townships never left his oeuvre or subject matter. Through his expressive, evocative and poetic work, Koloane has interrogated the socio-political and existential human condition, in this divided city of tidy suburbia and dusty, smokey townships. In painting, drawing, printmaking, assemblages and mixed media, he delivers scenes both exuberant and sombre, blending discernible and opaque pictorial narratives.

Sam Nhlengethwa  (b.1955) 

Over the course of his career, Sam Nhlengethwa – dubbed “one of the country’s most celebrated living artists” - has developed a distinctive collage and painting practice that explores the everyday mechanisms of South African life. In so doing, the artist has established himself as an important voice within contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora.

In early 1996, Nhlengethwa visited a number of coal, diamond and gold mines in South Africa. He spent time underground, interacting with the miners who inspired him to make artworks that depict miners and the challenging conditions they confront every day in mines which are sometimes kilometres deep beneath the surface. Through these images, Nhlengethwa seeks to give dignity to the frequently forgotten miners whose lives are spent unearthing the mineral wealth of South Africa. 

Walter Oltmann 

Walter Oltmann was born in Rustenburg in 1960, holds a BA (Fine Arts) from the University of Natal Pietermaritzburg, and MA (Fine Arts) from the University of Witwatersrand, where he was Senior Lecturer in sculpture for some years before pursuing his own art practice full time and completing his PhD. He won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, (Visual Art 2001),  the 2007 SASOL Wax Art Award and is a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation residency programme.

Oltmann is best known for his sculptural practice of weaving in wire, most often aluminium wire, but also in brass, copper and steel wire. Originally influenced by grass weaving, sisal and rope weaving in rural customs in South Africa, he has taken his unique approach to this form to unprecedented scale and complexity. The artist has works in many public collections in South Africa, Europe, Australia, South and North America including large commissioned public sculpture. 2019 saw the installation of his 6.5 metre high woven wire sculpture, Vase with Pincushions (Protea flowers of the southwestern mountains of South Africa), in the atrium of a corporation in California.  His practice also includes drawing and painting as well as printing highly detailed fine wire-like tracery in lithographs and etchings.

Tracey Rose (b.1974)

A critical voice in the global art landscape since the mid-90s, Tracey Rose works across performance, installation and photography to confront colonial legacies. Venus Baartman is a self-portrait in which Rose poses as Sarah Baartman. Baartman, who was brought to Europe in 1810 to be displayed in amusement fairs, became known by the racist slur “Hottentot Venus”. The work is a response to the way in which black bodies have been positioned and represented in colonial imagery —highlighting the continued violence of representation and use of the black female body, framed through scientific and anthropological devices. By investigating means of representation,  Rose exposes the pseudo-scientific ideas on which they are based. In this work, the artist’s body is a site of resistance, protest and refusal.

Cyprian Shilakoe (1946 - 1972)

Cyprian Shilakoe was born in Barberton in Mpumalanga.  He grew up on a Bushbuckridge mission station with his grandmother as his parents were migrant workers. He was one of the first classes of students to attend the Fine Arts course at Rorke's Drift Arts and Crafts Centre, studying printmaking there from 1968 to 1969. He worked with Azaria Mbatha and John Muafangejo at the art school during this time. In early 1970, he established a studio at St Ansgar Mission in Roodepoort  to the northwest of Johannesburg, and worked closely with Dan Rakgoathe. He began making carved wooden sculpture and drawings alongside his etchings.  Shilakoe held his first solo exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Hyde Park, Johannesburg in 1970.

Shilakoe was determined to explore in his works the dreams, the events and the legends of his people. He confidently predicted his own early death with calm acceptance, and frequently spoke of rejoining his beloved grandmother in the after life. In his few years of professional practice he organised for his works to be exhibited also in Germany, Scandinavia and the USA. 

Penny Siopis (b.1956)

Perhaps of all artists working in South Africa post-1970, Penny Siopis has exerted the most influence over aspiring students and scholars. Her stunningly prolific output, intellectual agility and natural interdisciplinary sensibility has captured the imaginations not only of fellow artists, curators and art lovers, but also of anthropologists, sociologists, historians and philosophers. It is difficult to resist being drawn into her capacity to reflect the always changing zeitgeist, on both locally-specific and globally-relevant levels.

All of Siopis’ explorations, whether with body politics, memory, migration, or the relations between the human and non-human, are characterised by her interest in what she calls the ‘poetics of vulnerability’ – embodied in the dynamic play between materiality and reference, chance and contingency, form and formlessness, personal and collective history.

From the outset, Siopis’ attitude to painting has been simultaneously modernist and counter-modernist in its complex irreverence to the purity of both the creative act and “arm’s length painting”. At that time such ‘mastery’ was at the centre of the romance of the physical medium. This irreverence was perhaps most dramatically expressed in her performative parody of the ‘mastery’ of painting, or more accurately what she called masculine creative performance, a romance Siopis sought to challenge and re-articulate in her own work.

Clive van den Berg (b. 1956)

As an artist, curator, designer, writer, teacher and activist, Clive van den Berg has worked across various mediums throughout the course of his career, producing a range of works unified by his enduring focus on six interrelated themes: memory, light, landscape, desire, body and otherness. In Van den Berg’s body of work Memorials Without Facts, death and desire hold hands like lovers at the end of the world, looking back at havoc with a contemplative eye. The artist has made numerous works within this ongoing series – paintings, videos and public works – that poetically explore the memorialisation of trauma, sexuality, and marginal histories, often within the framework of fictional love stories as well as the small but potent histories of men loving.

Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953)

Working across sculpture, photography, video and drawing, Wafer explores the politics and poetics of place and mapping. Rooted in South Africa’s social, cultural and political geography, Wafer’s work engages issues of land and territory, particularly themes of location, dislocation, possession and dispossession.

Sue Williamson (b. 1941)

Sue Williamson is part of a pioneering generation of South African artists who challenged the apartheid government from the 1970s and has been represented by Goodman Gallery since 1993 - the year she held her first solo exhibition at the gallery for which she won the 1994 Vita award for best exhibition in the country.

Williamson has adhered to a documentarian’s credo of bearing witness and serving as a moral conscience. But she also finds new forms - aesthetic and technological - to renew her commitment to the above principles, and to draw the viewer into narratives she forges out of text, image and object. 

Her work forms part of the permanent collections of esteemed institutions including MoMA in New York (with her pioneering 1990 installation For Thirty Years Next to His Heart currently featuring on their The Sum of All Parts group exhibition, after their critically acclaimed Collection Rehang last year); London's Tate Modern; the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, to name a few. 

More recently, Williamson’s work has been included in major surveys around art and activism, particularly from the perspective of women artists at Centre Pompidou (2019) and Fondazione Merz (2019).