Sam Nhlengethwa | All Blues

The exhibition centres on a series of ten square works measuring 55 x 55 cm, a format loaded with significance. In 2010, the year Nhlengethwa turned 55, marked the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s landmark album Kind of Blue. To honour the occasion, he staged an exhibition of the same name at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg. Ten works produced during that period – a sequence spelling out “All Blues”, the title of Davis’s celebrated composition – were set aside at the time, partly because Nhlengethwa regarded them as a private gift to himself. Fifteen years later, invited to develop a new project for New York, Nhlengethwa has returned to these paintings, revisiting their structures and extending their logic into a fresh series.

All Blues and its presentation in New York also reflects on a much earlier milestone. In 1991, Nhlengethwa travelled outside South Africa for the first time in his life to attend a Triangle Network’s Artists’ Workshop in Pine Plains, New York. Triangle Network was founded by artist Sir Anthony Caro and collector and philanthropist Robert Loder after a workshop in upstate New York in 1982. Among more than 50 participants in 1991, Nhlengethwa was the only artist from the African continent. He recalls how the legendary and exiled Dumile Feni came to visit him, longing to meet a fellow South African and to understand what life was like there. Nhlengethwa encouraged him to come back, explained that apartheid was unravelling and gave him his number; Feni said he would be the first person he would call. He never had the opportunity to make that call nor see the moment of political transition he had desperately hoped for – Feni died of a heart attack in a New York City record store a few months later. The encounter remains a poignant marker of that period and its precarious thresholds.

This moment also recalls a time of experimentation for Nhlengethwa, tracing a return to the abstraction he explored during the late 1980s and early 1990s through the Thupelo Workshops. Founded by David Koloane and Bill Ainslie and modelled on the Triangle approach, Thupelo encouraged experimentation, collaboration and the expansion of an artist’s visual vocabulary. The workshops catalysed Nhlengethwa’s early explorations into non-figurative painting – an impulse he reopens here, weaving memories of that rigorous environment into new formal investigations. 

1991 was also the year Nhlengethwa first encountered the work of Romare Bearden at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which was hosting the retrospective exhibition Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987. Bearden’s relationship to jazz and collage became a lasting influence, reflected decades later