Artists: David Goldblatt - Clive van den Berg

Goodman Gallery presents 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. Their artworks show how space and place are loaded sites carrying the marks of personal and collective histories, revealing how the past persists in the present.

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. In tracing the marks of history across landscapes, the exhibition invites viewers to consider how past and present remain intertwined, revealing the enduring scars left by memory, industry, and displacement.

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).

Further solo exhibitions include ‘On the Mines’, Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019); ‘David Goldblatt’, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2018); ‘Structures of Dominium and Democracy’, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2018); ‘The Pursuit of Values’, Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg (2015); ‘Intersections Intersected: The Photography of David Goldblatt’, New Museum, New York (2009), then Amherst Art Museum, Massachusett (2011); Hasselblad, Hasselblad Center, Göteborg (2006);’ Fifty-One Years, A Retrospective’, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2005).

Collections include: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Hasselblad Collection, Göteborg; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Art Institute, Chicago; the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery; University of South Africa and Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) has focused on pioneering the insertion of queer perspectives into the larger rewrite of South African history throughout the course of his prolific forty-year career. Van den Berg has produced a range of works unified by his enduring focus on five interrelated themes: memory, light, landscape, desire and body.

Van den Berg’s retrospective, titled ‘Porous’, took place at the Wits Art Museum in late 2024 and is accompanied by a major new book published by Skira.

Other major solo exhibitions include ‘Remembering, a survey exhibition of paintings, prints and sculptures’ at Kwa-Zulu Natal Society of Art Gallery, Durban (2021) and ‘Personal Affects’ at Museum of African Art, New York (2005). Major curated exhibitions include ‘If You Look Hard Enough, You Can See Our Future: Selections of Contemporary South African Art from the Nando’s Art Collection’, The African American Museum of Dallas, Dallas (2023); ‘Breaking Down the Walls: 150 years of Art Collecting’, Iziko SANG, Cape Town (2023); ‘Screening of Memorials Without Facts: Men Loving’, São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo (2018); ‘Earth Matters: Lands as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa’, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. (2013-2014).

Collections include: El Espacio 23, Miami; Amant Foundation, New York; A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town; Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg; Spier Arts Trust, London; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington DC and Video Brasil, Sao Paulo.