Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Trace, Tremor, Remnant—an exhibition that brings the practices of David Goldblatt and Clive van den Berg into dialogue, offering a layered reflection on the histories embedded within South Africa’s landscapes.
Through different yet complementary approaches, Goldblatt’s photographs and van den Berg’s paintings explore the ways in which land functions as a repository of memory, power, and unresolved narratives. The exhibition presents two series of Goldblatt’s photographs—one taken during apartheid and the other after its end—alongside paintings by Van den Berg’s created in 2024 and 2025.
The Goodman Gallery exhibition runs alongside the final iteration of Goldblatt’s traveling retrospective, No Ulterior Motive, on view at the Yale University Art Gallery until June 2025. The major survey highlights his dedication to documenting life under apartheid and in the new South Africa. The London show also follows Van den Berg’s Johannesburg retrospective, Porous (2024), at the Wits Art Museum, which spotlighted his four-decade career and marked the release of his latest self-titled monograph published by SKIRA.
Van den Berg’s gestural paintings transform the landscape into a site of emotional and historical excavation. His works uncover unresolved stories beneath the surface, shaping the land as a porous vessel for lived experience. With an intuitive approach to form and texture, his paintings become maps of imagined topographies – spaces where absence and presence come together, and time folds into itself.
These landscapes, marked by their fluidity and fragmentation, invite reflection on the entanglements of identity and erasure.
The land, in Van den Berg’s vision, is not a passive witness but an active participant in an ongoing process of remembrance and transformation.
Goldblatt’s photographs, by contrast, engage the landscape with striking clarity, exposing the weight of his country’s history. The exhibition features works from ‘On the Mines’, a seminal series that documents the mining landscapes that have shaped South Africa’s industrial and socio-political identity, along with images from ‘Intersections’, which explore the lasting effects of apartheid in both the built and natural environment.
His lens captures the quiet yet potent residues of power, revealing how architecture, infrastructure, and terrain bear the imprints of ideological and economic forces.
Together, Van den Berg and Goldblatt navigate the shifting contours of South Africa’s physical and ideological terrains. Their works engage in a conversation on how space is shaped by the forces that define it – both visible and invisible.
Featured Artworks
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David Goldblatt (1930 - 2018, South Africa), through his lens, chronicled the people, structures and landscapes of his country from 1948, through the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the apartheid regime and into the democratic era until his death in June, 2018.
Goldblatt’s major traveling retrospective ‘No Ulterior Motive’ on view at Yale University Art Gallery covers the photographer’s seven-decade career. This follows acclaimed presentations at the Art Institute of Chicago (2023) and Fundación MAPFRE (2024).
