Standing in the Gap marks the first IN CONTEXT exhibition hosted by Goodman Gallery London - a curatorial strand in the gallery programme which considers the dynamics and tensions of place, with particular connection to the African Continent and its Diaspora. The series has introduced international artists from Joël Andrianomearisoa to Kader Attia, Wangechi Mutu to Mickalene Thomas to South African audiences and memorably included “Africans in America” (2016) co-curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Liza Essers, held concurrently with the Johannesburg iteration of the renowned international conference series BLACK PORTRAITURE[S].
Featured Artworks
Create a Goodman Gallery account to view pricing of available artworks and access purchasing.
Weaving narrative with a blend of fact and fiction they imagine different histories and speculate on the future. They are interested in the footnotes, marginalia and on connections yet to be made. Works range from iconic works from 1970s and 1980s by Faith Ringgold through to recent and new works created from 2021-2023 by burgeoning artists Nolan Oswald Dennis, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Ravelle Pillay.
Faith Ringgold’s soft sculptures were created during the early 1970s during a heightened political period when Ringgold instigated performances as an activist and campaigner for Women’s Rights. In 1983, Faith Ringgold created four abstract paintings which she named the Dah series. Up to this point, Ringgold’s works concerned specific people and issues, but the works from this period suggest an alternative language which the artist described as ‘painting the inside of my head.’
Alongside; Tavares Strachan’s Children's Encyclopedia (2023) is presented across the entire ground floor space. Here, a radical rethinking of pedagogical tools reworks the A-Z format foregrounding black experience, revealing central issues in his work which questions historically canonised narratives that marginalise or obscure others. The work makes its UK debut and is shown concurrent with Tavares Strachan’s major commission at the Royal Academy Courtyard for “Entangled Pasts, 1768-Now” and anticipates his forthcoming solo exhibition at Hayward Gallery this Summer.
Carrie Mae Weems’s critically acclaimed 2021 series Painting the Town is the artist’s latest body of photography and was recently included in the Barbican Art Gallery 2023 survey coinciding with her current European museum exhibitions at Hasselblad Centre and Kunstmuseum Basel. The work captures shuttered hoardings of stores in Portland, Oregan, where authorities attempted to cover and erase demonstrators’ slogans following the murder of George Floyd. Almost life-size in scale, the photographs present as trompe l’oeil the painted hoardings as abstract paintings.
These works are placed in conversation with recent work by a younger generation of artists hailing from Africa and it’s diaspora: Hank Willis Thomas’s recent work We Must Dare To Invent The Future (2023) is a quilt directly inspired by Ringgold’s work. It is composed of fragmented pieces of the national flags of African nations, the pieces interlocking in an apparently puzzle-like matrix. On closer inspection, the pattern references the quilt tradition of the African American Underground Railroad.
Kudzanai Chiurai’s practice addresses aspects of Pan-Africanism and the history of colonial resistance in Africa that are often disregarded. An interplay between text and image, in Untitled (Office for the Enregisterment of Slaves) (2016), Chiurai employs a revisionist strategy to disrupt what he refers to as ‘colonial futures’ – embedding alternative memories into history that remedy the omissions inherent to the colonial project. He will be participating in the upcoming Venice Biennale exhibition Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
Works by younger artists also include recent paintings by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Ravelle Pillay. Phatsimo Sunstrum’s Assembly II (you see) (2023) first featured in the artist’s highly anticipated 2023 Johannesburg exhibition and in October 2024 the artist will present a solo presentation at The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery. Her work unpacks the concept of homecoming as an artist of the African diaspora, presenting cinematic scenes that slip between the real and the imagined. New painting by Ravelle Pillay, who made her UK debut at the Chisenhale Gallery in 2023, further investigates obscured histories. Drawing on her family history of indentured labour, Pillay attempts in her painting to uncover the ghosts of family connections.
