David Goldblatt: Intersections Intersected

About

Open Eye Gallery is proud to present the first UK showing of a striking new exhibition project by celebrated South African photographer David Goldblatt - his first solo UK exhibition since 2003. Goldblatt's colour work of the last decade explores the intersections between people, values and land in post-apartheid South Africa. It develops and extends the approach of his major essays from the years of apartheid, which were executed almost exclusively in black and white. In this exhibition photographs from both periods are combined in carefully selected pairings, the congruities and incongruities of which speak eloquently of continuity and change in South Africa. David Goldblatt has photographed his native South Africa since the early 1970s, carefully observing the social, cultural and economic divides that characterise the country. His work is about the physical and ideological landscape, the legacy of the colonial era and the apartheid years of its recent past. David Goldblatt was born in Randfontein in 1930. His major retrospective exhibition, David Goldblatt - 51 Years, was shown in New York, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels, Munich and Johannesburg. His photographic essay South Africa: the Structure of Things Then was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1998. He was included on Documenta 11 in 2002 and Documenta 12 in 2007, and in the travelling mega-exhibition Africa Remix (2004-2007). His limited edition book, Particulars, won the award for the best photography book at the Rencontres d'Arles festival, France, in 2004. Goldblatt won the 2006 Hasselblad Foundation International Award for Photography.