Mapping Another Route - South African artists in a modern era
Goodman Gallery presents Mapping another Route – South African artists in a modern era, an exhibition featuring South African artists whose work reflects connections between art, politics and society in the latter half of the 20th century.
The exhibition marks the first of its kind at Goodman Gallery London, expanding on the 2006 exhibition Mapping the Route from the 60’s, held at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, which included works by Sydney Kumalo, Dumile Feni, Mmapula Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi, David Koloane and Sam Nhlengethwa. Mapping another Route seeks to hold space for conversations around the highly contested concept of the “modern era” while highlighting contributions of historically overlooked artists whose works manifest as hybrid evolutions of modern elements and urgent sociopolitical prompts.
The exhibition also expands on discussions sparked by influential exhibitions on African Art in the US and the UK from Art from Africa of Our Time (1961) staged by the Harmon Foundation in New York, which included Gerard Sekoto, and three decades later in the UK at The Whitechapel Gallery’s Seven Stories About Modern Art In Africa (1994) exhibition, co-curated by Koloane. From the 1940s through to the early 1990s, South African artists of colour explored what it meant to carve out a black voice in relation to the apartheid context only to be met with racial prejudice and relegated to the periphery by the Western art canon.
Artworks
About
David Koloane
David Koloane (1938 – 2019) was born in Alexandra, Johannesburg, South Africa. Koloane spent his career making the world a more hospitable place for black artists during and after apartheid. Koloane achieved this through his pioneering work as an artist, writer, curator, teacher and mentor to young and established artists at a time when such vocations were restricted to white people in South Africa. A large part of this effort involved the initiatives Koloane helped establish, from the first Black Art Gallery in 1977, the Thupelo experimental workshop in 1985 and the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in 1991, where he served as director for many years. Koloane also tutored at the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) in 1979 and became the head of the fine art section and gallery from 1985 to 1990.
Through his expressive, evocative and poetic artwork, Koloane interrogated the socio-political and existential human condition, using Johannesburg as his primary subject matter. Koloane’s representations of Johannesburg are populated with images of cityscapes, townships, street life, jazz musicians, traffic jams, migration, refugees, dogs, and birds among others. Imaginatively treated, through the medium of painting, drawing, assemblage, printmaking and mixed media, Koloane’s scenes are a blend of exuberant and sombre, discernible and opaque pictorial narratives.
Koloane’s work has been widely exhibited locally and internationally. In 1999 he was part of the group exhibition _Liberated Voices_ at the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC. In 2013, Koloane’s work was shown on the South African pavilion at the 55th la Biennale di Venezia and on the group exhibition _My Joburg_ at La Maison Rouge in Paris. In 1998, the government of the Netherlands honoured Koloane with the Prince Claus Fund Award for his contributions to South African art. Koloane was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate twice, once from Wits University in 2012, and again from Rhodes University in 2015. In 2019 Koloane was the subject of a travelling career survey exhibition, _A Resilient Visionary: Poetic Expressions of David Koloane_, which opened at IZIKO SANG and later travelled to Standard Bank Gallery and Wits Art Museum in October.
William Kentridge
William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg, South Africa) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions.
In 2024, in Venice, Kentridge premiered a new nine-episode video series SELF-PORTRAIT AS A COFFEE-POT – a site-specific installation curated by long-time collaborator and curator Carolyn Christov Bakargiev at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation. Folowing this, in October, MUBI presented: William Kentridge’s ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ Premiere in New York.
In conjunction with the world premiere of his newly commissioned opera The Great Yes, The Great No, which debuted at LUMA Arles in July 2024, the solo exhibition Je n’attends plus (I’m Not Waiting Any Longer) presents a collection of major works, some of which had not been seen in Europe before.
Kentridge’s largest UK survey to date was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2022. An iteration of Kentridge’s Royal Academy survey opened at the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts in May 2024. In the same year Kentridge opened another major survey exhibition, In Praise of Shadows, at The Broad, Los Angeles. In 2023, this exhibition travelled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums across the globe since the 1990s, including the Luma Foundation, France (2024); Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation, Venice (2024); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2024); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999, 2005, 2010); Albertina Museum, Vienna (2010); Musée du Louvre, Paris (2010); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (2015); Kunstmuseum Basel (2019); Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019). The artist has also participated in biennale’s including Documenta in Kassel (2012, 2002, 1997) and the Venice Biennale (2015, 2013, 2005, 1999, 1993).
Collections include: MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi and Zeitz MoCAA, Cape Town.
Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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David Goldblatt
David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018) was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, South African he chronicled the structures, people and landscapes of South Africa from 1948 until his death in June 2018. Well known for his photography which explored both public and private life in South Africa, Goldblatt created a body of powerful images which depicted life during the time of Apartheid. Goldblatt also extensively photographed colonial era monuments and buildings with the idea that the architecture reveals something about the people who built them.
In particular, Goldblatt documented the people, landscapes and industry of the Witwatersrand, the resource-rich area in which he grew up and lived, where the local economy was based chiefly on mining. Equal parts artist and documentarian, Goldblatt was known for his practice of attaching extensive captions to his photographs, which almost always identify the subject, place, and time in which the image was taken. These titles often play a vital role in exposing the visible and invisible forces through which the country’s policies of extreme racism and segregation shaped the dynamics of life, especially along axes of gender, labor, identity, and freedom of movement. Beyond endowing his images with documentary power, Goldblatt’s titles also dignify the people and places he photographs.
In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop, a training institution in Johannesburg, for aspiring photographers. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Goldblatt Archive is held by Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.
In 2001, a retrospective of his work, ‘David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years’ began a tour of galleries and museums. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. A more recent retrospective includes, ‘David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive at the AIC’ (2018), which is now touring. This major traveling retrospective exhibition spans the seven decades of this South African photographer’s career, from the 1950s to the 2010s, demonstrating Goldblatt’s commitment to showing the realities of daily life in his country. The exhibition and accompanying publication bring together roughly 150 works by Goldblatt from the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago—two major Goldblatt repositories—including his early black-and-white photography and his post-apartheid, large-format color photography.
Goldblatt was the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, the 2013 ICP Infinity Award and in 2016, he was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France.
Other notable group exhibitions and biennales include: ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, South Africa in Apartheid and After, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2013); Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s, Barbican Centre, London (2012). He also exhibited at the Jewish Museum (2010); and the New Museum (2009), both in New York.
Selected key collections include: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Tate Modern, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty; Museum, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany and New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
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Robert Hodgins
Robert Hodgins (b. 1920, Dulwich, England) became a Lecturer in 1954 at the School of Art, Pretoria Technical College, where he remained until 1962. Then he took up a position as Journalist and Critic for Newscheck magazine. Between 1966 and 1983 he was a Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand Fine Art Department. At the end of 1983 he retired to take up painting full-time.
Some Hodgins’ paintings convey a feeling of deep seriousness and sadness; the paintings depict a sense of confusion that many people experience. However Hodgins believed that being an artist is about creating something new, an artist perfects the art of ingeniously reinventing content within society.
“Being an artist is about putting something into your subject matter that isn’t inherently there,” wrote Hodgins in 2000. “You are not at the mercy of your subject matter, it’s the content, and what you put into it, what you do with it, what extract from it, and what you put it with, that is so exciting. If you are aware of this, then you begin to build on the content of your whole life. Before you know where you are, you’re already thinking about the next work, and you could live to be 300. Paintings can be one-night stands or lifetime love-affairs – you never know until you get cracking”
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Sue Williamson
Sue Williamson (b. 1941, Lichfield, UK) is one of South Africa’s most important contemporary artists. In the 1970s, Williamson started to make work which addressed social change and by the late 1980s she was well known for her series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle, titled A Few South Africans (1980s).
In 2025, a major retrospective of her five-decades long career, titled There’s something I must tell you, will be shown at the Iziko South African National Gallery, following her UK and US institutional exhibitions in 2023 at The Box, Plymouth and The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
In 1997, Williamson founded www.artthrob.co.za, a leading website on South African contemporary art and the first of its kind in the country. Williamson has also authored two major publications - South African Art Now (2009) and Resistance Art in South Africa (1989).
Williamson has participated in biennales around the world, including the Kochi Muziris Biennale (2019); several Havana Biennales as well as Sydney, Istanbul, Venice and Johannesburg biennales.
Major international solo exhibitions include: Between Memory and Forgetting, The Box, Plymouth, UK (2023); Other Voices, Other Cities, Las Palmas (2023); Can’t Remember, Can’t Forget, Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017); Other Voices, Other Cities, SCAD Museum of Art, Georgia (2015), Messages from the Moat, Den Haag, (2003) and The Last Supper Revisited, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. (2002).
Group exhibitions include: Tell Me What You Remember, Barnes Foundation (2023); Breaking Down the Walls – 150 years of Collecting Art at Iziko, Iziko South African Museum (2022); RESIST! The 1960s Protests, Photography and Visual Legacy, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2018); Women House, La Monnaie de Paris and National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington D.C) (2017, 2018); Being There, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, International Centre for Photography in New York and the Museum Africa in Johannesburg (2014); The Short Century, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and P.S.1 New York (2001-2).
Collections include: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg. Williamson has authored two books – ‘South African Art Now’ (2009) and ‘Resistance Art in South Africa’ (1989).
Awards and fellowships include: The Living Legends Award (2020), attributed by the South African government’s Department of Sports, Arts and Culture; the University of Johannesburg’s Ellen Kuzwayo Award (2018); the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship (2011); the Smithsonian’s Visual Artist Research Award Fellowship (2007) and the Lucas Artists Residency Fellowship (2005) from Montalvo Art Center in California.
Williamson lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.
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