Artist: Justin Dingwall

Doyle Wham presents South African artist Justin Dingwall’s first UK solo exhibition: I See the Same Sky. Dingwall (b. 1983, Johannesburg) uses photography as an investigative tool to explore the complexities of our contemporary world and the human experience.

The exhibition features seven large-scale artworks created in 2024 which exemplify the artist’s recent experimentation with thermal-transfer printing and the interweaving of photography and textile. Each artwork is born from a photograph taken by Dingwall which is then thermally printed onto linen. Additional material elements are hand-stitched across the surface by the artist, transforming each photograph into a multi-layered, three dimensional image.

In the series Beautiful Terrible, the artist presents striking portraits of female matadors. Bullfighting, with the extreme contradiction at its core between violence and beautifully adorned, highly skilled dramatics, has inspired artists for centuries. The female matador’s existence can be considered a further contradiction in this typically hyper-masculine environment, and yet women bullfighters have existed since the origins of the sport in Spain in the late 1700s, with Goya notably depicting a woman known as La Pajuelera sparring with a bull in 1816. In spite of this rich history, women were banned from official participation for the majority of the C20th, with Spanish bullfighter Cristina Sánchez becoming the first woman in Europe to gain full matador status in 1996. Dingwall’s roots in fashion photography have enabled him to meld the traditional matadorial “traje de luces” (suit of lights) with the exaggerated silhouettes of high fashion. The amplified shapes and textural density of the clothing serve to exaggerate the drama of the bullfighting ring - these women are quite literally dressed to kill.

Also exhibited are artworks from Dingwall’s most recent series, When I Stare at the Night Sky, in which he explores the imperfect nature of memory. Through fragmenting and reconfiguring each photograph, he invites us to consider the ways in which our own memories are threaded together, forming unique tapestries with inevitable imperfections. The artist’s choice of textural fabrics also highlights the importance of material objects and keepsakes, often enriched with emotional significance, as anchors for memory.

Justin Dingwall is a South African visual artist whose work straddles fashion, photographic portraiture and social activism. Since graduating from the Tshwane University of Technology in 2004, Dingwall has become internationally recognised for his explorations of taboos, stigmas, and how beauty ideals are conditioned by cultural attitudes and politics, particularly in African contexts.

Dingwall has exhibited at major museums including Fotografiska Shanghai, Centre Pompidou, Vitra Design Museum, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Blanton Museum of Art (Texas), Turchin Center for the Visual Arts (North Carolina) and the Albuquerque Museum (New Mexico).

Dingwall’s works form part of important collections around the world, including the Rand Merchant Bank Collection (South Africa), Pretoria Art Museum (South Africa), The Spier Art Collection (South Africa), Oliewenhuis Art Museum (South Africa), The Museum of Modern African Art (Equatorial Guinea), Bonnefanten Museum (Netherlands), and Sindika Dokolo Collection (Belgium).