Artists

Ernest Cole

Press release

Goodman Gallery is delighted to present part one of a three-part exhibition between the UK, Europe and South Africa by the late Ernest Cole. In collaboration with the Magnum Gallery in Paris and the Ernest Cole Family Trust, House of Bondage: Vintage works from the Ernest Cole Family Trust will present rare vintage prints by Cole that reveal the astonishing breadth of work created by the photographer during his brief career.

Following two major exhibitions in London at The Photographer’s Gallery and Autograph, and Cole’s publications House of Bondage and The True America, published by Aperture in 2022 and 2023, this show provides perspectives from South Africa and the wider continent, with artists, writers and curators examining Cole’s methodology and offering new insights into his work. Part l will take place at the London gallery this November. Part ll and lll will be shown in Magnum Gallery, Paris and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, respectively, in January and February next year. While all three exhibitions include vintage prints selected from House of Bondage, each exhibition will be unique.

Shown across all three cities for the first time is a body of work titled “Black Ingenuity”, which exhibits Black creative expression and cultural activity taking place under apartheid. Images of artists attending exhibition openings and racially mixed political rallies and dance troupes, offer a new way of looking at the grim but ever mutating world of apartheid. This chapter situates Cole within a circle of leading artists and thinkers, including a young Dumile Feni xxx (nancy to share names). Works in this chapter highlight Cole’s desire to acknowledge the lively cultural production at the time – with a particular focus on Johannesburg’s Dorkay House – despite Apartheid’s oppression of Black life and stifling of creative spaces for people of colour.