Depicting Jozi’s urban entanglements

Goodman Gallery’s crucial archival exhibition programme continues with this insightful and long-overdue homage exhibition bringing together the work of three of SA’s most important contemporary black artists — the late David Koloane (1938—2019), Kagiso “Pat” Mautloa and Sam Nhlengethwa.

The exhibition features a selection of paintings, drawings and charcoal works on paper from the most consequential period in recent SA art history — the 1980s to the 2020s.

All three artists have been instrumental in this time period in changing institutional and official perceptions about contemporary art.

From a conceptual perspective, what brings the work of the three artists together is a common grounding in and how they respond to Joburg, where they all share a work and life history.

The exhibition makes the somewhat decrepit City of Gold into the focal point for an intelligent and sensitively curated showcase of the work of a group of artists who have become synonymous with contemporary black art in Joburg.

Jozi has preoccupied many artists and writers over its relatively short existence. Where Koloane, Mautloa and Nhlengethwa differ in their visual approaches is in the way all three of them have been actively involved in creating physical spaces to promote access and networks for Joburg’s contemporary black artists.

All three, but in very different visual registers and using different materials and styles, reflect on the street life and working-class life of the city, lives that have changed significantly in recent times, but have also depressingly remained the same.

The spatial legacies of the mining origins of the city and its subsequent apartheid organisation preoccupy all three from the 1970s onwards.

Koloane’s charcoal drawings and mixed media works are dense and highly distinctive — his unique iconography of urban decay and post-industrial landscapes, full of mangy dogs and gridlocked traffic, speak of the city’s inequality and oppression but in a dark brand of expressionism that seems to fit with the city’s character.

Mautloa is still active in the urban Bag Factory studio complex, the organisation on whose board he sits, and still making work that reflects, in painting and charcoal works, not only on the historically shifting nature of his city, and the lived experience of the black working class within it, but also elements of spiritual and ancestral life that still animates much of SA.

Nhlengethwa’s work has for many years ranged across media and subject matter, all intimately tied to life in Joburg. Also previously a resident artist at the Bag Factory for decades, Nhlengethwa has depicted not only the depredations of the apartheid regime with his iconic work on Biko’s death, but the changing life of Jozi with his multimedia works focused on street life, fashion and especially the love of his life, jazz music.

Given the intertwining of the histories of these three iconic artists, the exhibition juxtaposes the work of all three, making visual rather than sequential or chronological connections. A timeline text in the first room of the gallery provides that context, leaving viewers to enjoy the ways in which their different visions of Jozi and SA life resonate.

What is not necessarily visually present here is given an important voice in these wall texts, and that is the centrality of all three artists in the organisational and institutional development of contemporary black art in the city.

They all played pivotal roles in creating spaces like the Federated Union of Black Artists Arts Centre (Fuba), established to support black artists; the Thupelo Workshops, focused on collaborative artistic processes; the Johannesburg Art Foundation, an influential educational institution founded by artist Bill Ainslie; and the aforementioned Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, cofounded with British art collector and philanthropist Robert Loder.

Simply put, much of the city’s cultural landscape would not exist if it were not for these three artists — from Koloane’s crucial educational, mentoring and curatorial roles, to Mautloa’s and Nhlengethwa’s roles as dedicated artists and mentoring collaborators in these spaces and further afield, taking this Jozi art into the international artworld.

The exhibition finds a natural home in Jozi’s Goodman Gallery, which has long been a standard bearer for the work of the city’s contemporary black artists.

Urban Entanglements: How Art Reflects Citymaking is on at the Goodman Gallery, Joburg until May 29.