‘Gathering Fragments’ brings together the work of nine contemporary artists who explore abstraction as both a creative act and a means of questioning how we construct and navigate our world. Featuring Ghada Amer, El Anatsui, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Leonardo Drew, Remy Jungerman, William Kentridge, Kapwani Kiwanga, Atta Kwami and Hank Willis Thomas, the exhibition reflects on the intersections of history, power and knowledge. Through materiality, gestural marks, and layered compositions, each artist unearths narratives that are fragmented, interconnected, and continually shifting, creating works that serve as “ephemeral mappings” of our time.
At the heart of the exhibition is an exploration of materiality and its potential to act as a palimpsest – a layered surface where history, memory and imagination coexist. El Anatsui’s ‘Untitled III’ and Leonardo Drew’s ‘Number 426’ exemplify this approach, using wood in ways that recall cycles of growth and erosion. Anatsui’s carefully selected wood tones and bold chainsaw cuts evoke both the richness of African cultural diversity and the scars of violence endured, while Drew’s process of splintering, ripping and layering conveys a powerful dynamic between order and entropy, mirroring the cyclical nature of existence.
In a complementary way, Ghada Amer and William Kentridge address material as a vessel of identity and social critique. Amer’s ‘Suzy’, a bronze cast of a female form, reclaims agency within the artistic tradition, offering a narrative of bodily autonomy through intricate textures and shadows. Her subversive, tactile approach resonates with Kentridge’s ‘Try to Understand this Simple Speech’, a layered ink and collage work that reinterprets South African histories. Here, history is neither fixed nor complete but continuously reconstituted, embodying a dialogue between memory and erasure. ‘Gathering Fragments’ will be open until the 11th of January 2025 at Goodman Gallery Cape Town.
