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.