Goodman Gallery Johannesburg presents Paradise, Jeremy Wafer’s elegy to loss and irreversible change within both rural and built environments. Conceived as a unified installation, the exhibition brings together works rendered in Wafer’s signature spare and elegant visual language, each piece resonating with and responding to those around it. Together, they create a singular, immersive atmosphere—one marked by longing, wistfulness, and quiet reflection on absence.
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A photograph of the station’s abandoned siding signage deepens the sense of dereliction and disappearance. At the heart of the show is a ‘moving drawing’—a large-scale projection of gathering clouds -further developing themes of unease, impermanence, and the slow decay of once-functional spaces.
The exhibition conveys a haunting sense of lives and ways of living left behind, of our inability to retain a permanent foothold in place and time. Wafer invites viewers into a subtly powerful meditation on memory, transience, and the unknowability of what lies ahead. Paradise is a masterfully composed reflection on what we cannot hold onto as we look toward uncertain futures.
Artist Bio
Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953, Durban, South Africa) works across sculpture, photography, video and drawing, exploring the politics and poetics of place. Rooted in South Africa’s social, cultural and political geography, his work engages issues of land and territory, particularly themes of location, dislocation, possession and dispossession.
Wafer studied at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (B.A Fine Art, 1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (B.A. Hons. in Art History 1980, M.A. Fine Art 1987 and PhD, 2017). He has taught in the Fine Art Department of the Technikon Natal, Durban, and at the School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he was appointed Professor of Fine Art in 2011.
Solo exhibitions include: 'Material Immaterial,' Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); 'Arc,' Goodman Gallery, London (2022); 'Index,' Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2017); Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2014); 'Structure: Avenues and barriers of Power,' a retrospective at KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009).
Group exhibitions include: 'Centre of Gravity,' The Old Soap Works, Bristol (2020); 'Ampersand,' University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2019); 'Everywhere but Here,' Cite International des Arts, Paris (2017); 'What remains is Tomorrow,' The Pavilion of South Africa at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2015); 'Witness,' Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014); 'Views of Africa,' Smithsonian National Museum of Air and Space, Washington DC. (2013); and '20: Two Decades of South African Sculpture,' NIROX Foundation, the Cradle of Humankind, (2010).
Wafer’s work features in the following public collections: the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC; South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Wafer lives and works between London and Johannesburg.
