A focus on land, landscape and Sustainability with Goodman Gallery and Cheetah Plains
Goodman Gallery’s pioneering partnership with Africa’s leading carbon negative lodge Cheetah Plain Private Game Reserve has been ongoing since 2024. Through a bespoke hang of contemporary art across all three villas accompanied by a curated art space, art becomes the channel for exploring the thematics of sustainability, memory, land and possible futures within the inspiring setting of the Sabi Sabi Nature Reserve.
A new exhibition in the art space titled ‘Sustainability and the Imagined Landscape: A Dialogue Across Practices’, brings together a group of artists whose work explores the layered relationships between sustainability, memory, and the landscape. Across the villas echo the lines of inquiry established in the project space, drawing strongly on the idea of real and imagined landscapes bearing witness to and implicated in ecological breakdown and ongoing environmental transformation.
Each of the villas Mapogo, Karula and Mvula, are filled with works by African and Diaspora artists well-known to the gallery roster, including David Goldblatt, William Kentridge, Clive van den Berg, alongside those who have joined or exhibited with the gallery over the last 2 years: Pélagie Gbaguidi, Kate Gottgens, Lindokuhle Sobekwa and Guy Simpson
Karula includes a large-scale photograph by David Goldblatt, one of South Africa’s most significant photographers. The work titled ‘Copper-bearing rocks, near the workings started by Simon Van Der Stel governor of the Cape, during an expedition in 1650, Carolusberg, Namaqualand, Northern Cape. 1 January 2004’ (2004) is from Goldblatt’s wide-ranging series of colour photographs titled ‘Intersections’, a body of work made between 2001 to 2012, subsequently published as ‘Regarding Intersections’ and ‘Intersections Intersected’. This work included explorations of land and landscape, people, towns and monuments - all held together by Goldblatt’s interest in our values as a society, and how we express those values in the marks we make and leave behind. Goldblatt only began exploring the use of colour in his work in the 1990s prompted by a new political dispensation in post-apartheid South Africa.
Van den Berg’s ink drawing ‘Landscape Above, Below XII’ (2019) is a contrast to the large-scale moody, red-soaked painting Aquifer VI (Caldera) (2025), both on view at Karula. ‘Landscape Above, Below XII’ presents as black and white geological mapping of the artist’s ongoing investigation of the landscape layers and his own relationship to landscape. ‘Unsettled Air XIII’ continues Van den Berg’s engagement with the idea of the land as a porous receptacle for lived experience. In these works the artist continues to reflect on his own complex relationship to landscape with this painting communicating a more visceral articulation of this engagement. This is embedded in the quality of the paint as much as the construction of the paintings and the abstract imagery that emerges on the canvas.
Across the villas are selections from Walter Oltmann’s ‘Romper’ series. He is fascinated with how plants defend themselves or communicate with pollinators through colour. The ‘Romper’ series draws ingenious evolution but also highlights the playful nature of this. A romper is a one-piece garment, especially worn by a young child, but it can also be understood in the sense of boisterous and wild behaviour of a person. For these works Oltmann has used fluorescent colour to suggest bioluminescence in insects as a defense mechanism as well as signaling other individuals of the same species to attract one another.
Mvula includes work by Kagiso Pat Mautloa, co-founding artist of Johannesburg’s iconic Bag Factory Artist Studios. Still occupying the same studio since the arts organisation’s inception, Mautloa’s work contemplates the landscape of his city; from the impact of the mines on the environment and social structures to reflections on community as urban infrastructure. Here the idea of imagined landscapes recalled from the gallery space feels potent, with Johannesburg in perpetual evolution based on past and present imaginaries of aspiration, excess, division and anxiety. His more abstract works such as Untitled (2018) demonstrate the blurring of these forms, thinking through urbanity from a more expansive vantage point.
Following on from this is contemporary Surinamese-Dutch Remy Jungerman’s limited edition silkscreen prints, including PEEPINA C I (2011) and PEEPINA A VI (2011). Inspired by the geometric motifs found in Surinamese Maroon shoulder capes, Jungerman recognised a visual link between Maroon culture's aesthetics and Western modernism. This print series invites an exploration of patterns and vibrant colours that retains the visible evidence of their origin with the reference to Western abstraction. Over the past 30 years Jungerman has woven thematic threads that are deeply connected to his birthplace, Suriname, placing fragments of Maroon textiles and other materials found in the African diaspora in relation to materials from Western art. Here, landscape is referenced as both as physical space but also as cosmological and aesthetic landscapes
Thinking more about land, memory and landscape more directly is work from Dor Guez’s Letters from the Greater Maghreb series. This work on a foundational moment in Guez’s family history when his grandparents escaped from concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Tunisia and later, in 1951, immigrated to Israel. Important personal documents were water damaged during the trip. One of these was a manuscript written by his grandfather in Judeo-Tunisian Arabic. Taking the fragile pages of the surviving document and creating enlarged scans of the single sheets and sections, Guez intensifies themes of blurring and loss in the works. The blown up fragments emphasise the visualisation of loss and memory while the story of the journey speaks to the movement of people across landscapes.
While the works above are highlights from the villas, they speak to the themes present across the exhibition, drawing on physical, historical and metaphorical references to land, landscape and memory. This points to thinking around sustainability, both of the environment and cultural signifiers.
