All

Blues:

Sam

Nhlengethwa's

jazz-infused

return

to

New

York

at

Goodman

Gallery

Goodman Gallery New York opened All Blues, a new exhibition by Sam Nhlengethwa that brings together a methodical and deeply personal body of work shaped by numerology, abstraction and the artist’s enduring love of jazz. Marked by milestones, tributes and memories, this show revisits various foundational moments for the artist.

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.