Installation view Goodman Gallery London
I am always trying to look at other ways of understanding the world, other ways of producing knowledge. Something I am highly interested in is our relationship to the cosmos, to plants, to ghosts, to the non visible, to non-human beings
- Maheke
Goodman Gallery presents Ancestral Musing, Paul Maheke’s first solo exhibition with the London gallery spread across the lower ground and featuring two new bodies of work in which the artist continues to expand on his performance practice to include drawing and installation. For the exhibition, the artist continues to explore his interests in the experiential aspect of the body within space as well as the ways in which the body can act as an archive of history and personal experience. As such, Maheke’s exploration of the ancestral muse, seeks to highlight questions about history, visibility and representation.
While creating a suite of new drawings, Maheke returned to his early education in etching, expanding on themes such as the different forms of interconnectedness and entanglement, which he explored in recent touring institutional shows at Galerie Rudolfinum (2023) and Kunsthalle Bratislava (2022). Through delicate and intricate lines, striking muses emerge on multiple surfaces from paper to aluminum. Each work explores the act of drawing as a process of emergence. Rather than predicting what he will draw, the artist allows the surfaces on which he applies his marks to dictate the images that appear, channeling the faces and bodies of his ancestral muses through the material itself. For the artist, connecting with these muses is a way of tuning in with other realities as well as exploring the tenuous border between the visible and the invisible.
Installation view Goodman Gallery London
Installation view Goodman Gallery London
Paul Maheke (b.1985, Brive-la-Gaillarde, France) graduated from Cergy School of Fine Arts and is an Open School East (London) alum. His practice spans performance, video, sound and installation incorporating simple gestures placed in public space and includes video, sound, installation and performance. His work examines entrenched stories and representations often emerging from the Western imagination. Recent solo exhibitions include: Shifted Realities at Galerie Rudolfinum (2023), You and I at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2022), We took a sip from the devil’s cup at Project Arts Centre in Dublin (2022), As the days move into nights at Diagonale in Montreal (2022), A fire circle for a public hearing at Chisenhale in London (2018),Vleeshal Middelburg (2019), and I Lost Track of the Swarm at South London Gallery (2016). Selected group exhibitions include: Le souffle des ancetres- at the Biennale du Congo in Kinshasa (2022), Temporary Atlas: Mapping the Self in the Art of Today at Mostyn in Wales, Future Generation Art Prize 2021 at the 59th Venice Biennale in Italy (2022), Afterness at Art Angel London in Orford Ness (2021), Le centre ne peut tenir at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris (2018), Ten Days Six Nights at Tate Modern in London (2017), and the Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017).