Marian Goodman

David Goldblatt

04 May - 16 Jun 2007

© DAVID GOLDBLATT
The waiting room of Bingo Cash Loans, Elliot, Eastern Cape, 8 August 2006
Digital print in pigment dyes on 100% rag cotton paper
100 x 125 cm (paper)
97 x 125 cm (image)
DAVID GOLDBLATT

We are very happy to present a new exhibition of works by David Goldblatt. The show will open to the public on 4th May and will end on 16th June 2007. We will present a series of recent color and black & white photographs as well as the entire “Particulars” series.

The “Particulars” series is composed of 27 black & white photographs shot in 1975 and published in Particulars (2003).* Each photograph focuses on a fragment of the body: the hands, feet etc. The gaze of the viewer is invited to engage with different gestures and textures and to become aware of the details of the body and their expressiveness. Formal beauty is, however, only an aspect of Goldblatt’s work.

David Godlblatt is one of the most recognized photographers of his generation. His long career has followed the fragmented history of his homeland South Africa. During the apartheid David Godlblatt photographed “from both sides”; first Afrikaners, then Black South Africans in the 1970s. Photography has for him been a means of analyzing the social and cultural structures of his country and of documenting the evolution and end of the apartheid.

Since 1999 Goldblatt has used color photography to explore the different aspects of post-apartheid society. The series of photographs exhibited at the gallery underlines his ongoing engagement with the social and political questions which underpin South Africa’s contemporary society, as well as his relationship to time and history. This is particularly emphasized by the titles of the works which often contrast with the emptiness and silence of the photographs.

A major retrospective (organized by Corinne Diserens and Okwui Enwezor) « David Goldblatt fifty-one years » which brought together over 200 photographs was dedicated to the work of David Goldblatt. Starting in the United States at the AXA Gallery, New York in 2001, the show was then exhibited at the Barcelona Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA), at the Witte de With – Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam in 2002, and at the Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles, and at the Lenbachhaus Munich in 2003. The « Intersections » series were also exhibited at the Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf and at Camera Austria, Graz in 2005. Two significant exhibitions of David Goldblatt’s work are currently on view at the Fotomuseum in Winterthur (until May 20th 2007) and at the Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (until May 27th 2007).

David Goldblatt was nominated for the Citigroup Photography Prize 2004. He received the 2006 Hasselblad award. An exhibition entitled the « 2006 Hasselblad Award Winner », held in Göteborg, Sweden, was dedicated to him on this occasion.

*David Goldblatt received the 2004 Rencontres d’Arles award for this publication.
 

Tags: Okwui Enwezor, David Goldblatt