Goodman Gallery New York is pleased to announce All Blues, a new exhibition by Sam Nhlengethwa that brings together a methodical and deeply personal body of work shaped by numerology, abstraction and the artist’s enduring love of jazz. Marked by milestones, tributes and memories, this show revisists various foundational moments for the artist.
The exhibition centres on a series of ten square works measuring 55 x 55 cm, a format loaded with significance. In 2010, the year Nhlengethwa turned 55, marked the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s landmark album Kind of Blue. To honour the occasion, he staged an exhibition of the same name at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg. Ten works produced during that period – a sequence spelling out “All Blues”, the title of Davis’s celebrated composition – were set aside at the time, partly because Nhlengethwa regarded them as a private gift to himself. Fifteen years later, invited to develop a new project for New York, Nhlengethwa has returned to these paintings, revisiting their structures and extending their logic into a fresh series.
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All Blues and its presentation in New York also reflects on a much earlier milestone. In 1991, Nhlengethwa travelled outside South Africa for the first time in his life to attend a Triangle Network’s Artists’ Workshop in Pine Plains, New York. Triangle Network was founded by artist Sir Anthony Caro and collector and philanthropist Robert Loder after a workshop in upstate New York in 1982. Among more than 50 participants in 1991, Nhlengethwa was the only artist from the African continent. He recalls how the legendary and exiled Dumile Feni came to visit him, longing to meet a fellow South African and to understand what life was like there. Nhlengethwa encouraged him to come back, explained that apartheid was unravelling and gave him his number; Feni said he would be the first person he would call. He never had the opportunity to make that call nor see the moment of political transition he had desperately hoped for – Feni died of a heart attack in a New York City record store a few months later. The encounter remains a poignant marker of that period and its precarious thresholds.
This moment also recalls a time of experimentation for Nhlengethwa, tracing a return to the abstraction he explored during the late 1980s and early 1990s through the Thupelo Workshops. Founded by David Koloane and Bill Ainslie and modelled on the Triangle approach, Thupelo encouraged experimentation, collaboration and the expansion of an artist’s visual vocabulary. The workshops catalysed Nhlengethwa’s early explorations into non-figurative painting – an impulse he reopens here, weaving memories of that rigorous environment into new formal investigations.
1991 was also the year Nhlengethwa first encountered the work of Romare Bearden at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which was hosting the retrospective exhibition Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987. Bearden’s relationship to jazz and collage became a lasting influence, reflected decades later when Nhlengethwa’s first US museum solo, Life, Jazz and Lots of Other Things (2014) at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, opened with a dialogue between their works. Tracing this influence, All Blues presents a series of collage tributes to musicians who have shaped the artist’s sensibility, including African-American drummer Elvin Jones and South African pianist Bheki Mseleku, who spent years in exile in the United Kingdom. These portraits continue Nhlengethwa’s long practice of honouring figures who sometimes sit at the edges of mainstream histories but remain central to his own. It is through such constellations that he has developed a visual language that has led the Sunday Times in South Africa to describe him as “one of the country’s most celebrated living artists”.
Exploring Sam Nhlengethwa’s Studio: Where Jazz Meets Art
Artist Bio
Sam Nhlengethwa (b. 1955, Payneville, Springs) part of a pioneering generation of late 20th century South African artists whose work reflects the sociopolitical history and everyday life of their country. Through his paintings, collages and prints Nhlengethwa has depicted the evolution of Johannesburg through street life, interiors, jazz musicians and fashion.
Nhlengethwa was born in the Black township community of Payneville near Springs (a satellite mining town east of Johannesburg), in 1955 and grew up in Ratanda location in nearby Heidelberg. In the 1980s, he moved to Johannesburg where he honed his practice at the renowned Johannesburg Art Foundation under its founder Bill Ainslie. Nhlengethwa is one of the founders of the legendary Bag Factory, in Newtown, in the heart of the Johannesburg CBD, where he used to share studio space with fellow greats of this pioneering generation of South African artists, such as David Koloane and Pat Mautloa.
In 2014, a major survey exhibition, titled 'Life, Jazz and Lots of Other Things,' was hosted by SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, which was then co-hosted in Atlanta by SCAD and the Carter Center.
Nhlengethwa’s practice features in important arts publications, such as Phaidon’s The 20th Century Art Book (2001).
Other notable exhibitions and accolades in South Africa and around the world include: in 1994 – the year South Africa held its first democratic elections – Nhlengethwa was awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year award; in 1995, his work was included in the Whitechapel Gallery’s 'Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa' in London; in 2000, he participated in a two-man show at Seippel Art Gallery in Cologne.
Group exhibitions include: 'Constructions: Contemporary Art from South Africa,' Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Niteroi, Brazil (2011); 'Beyond Borders: Global Africa,' University of Michigan Museum of Art, Michigan (2018).
Biennales include: 6th Beijing Biennale in (2015); 55th Venice Biennale, as part of the South African Pavilion, titled Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive (2013); 12th International Cairo Biennale (2010); 8th Havana Biennale (2003); Southern African Stories: A Print Collection, CCA (Caribbean Contemporary Arts), Trinidad (2002).
Collections include: Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), Durban Art Gallery (DAG), Iziko South African National Art Gallery (ISANG), Standard Bank’s Head Office, Absa, Botswana Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, amongst many in South Africa and abroad.
Nhlengethwa lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
