Bearing

"I often refer to my practice as life-work because it is lived, inhabited, embodied – but more fundamentally, because it asserts life and possibility within and despite conditions of impossibility – what I call the impossibility of black femme representation.”
— Gabrielle Goliath

On the occasion of her second solo exhibition at Raffaella Cortese, across all three spaces of the gallery, Gabrielle Goliath (Kimberley, South Africa, 1983) presents a new body of work on paper and canvas. Exploring the multiple meanings and registers of ‘bearing’, she turns to traditional media such as oils, watercolours, chalk and pastels. With sensitivity and care, the artist centres black, brown, femme and queer bodies, asking herself, and those who come to these works: how it is that such bodies carry, birth and service a world from which they remain excluded?

This new series of works further extends the artist’s already expansive multimedia practice and her sustained engagement with questions of representation, mourning, and black, brown, feminist and queer practices of survival. In the lush materiality of painting and drawing, she both inhabits and unsettles a Eurocentric visual grammar of the nude. Whilst tenderly figured and washed in colour, her subjects pose a problem to this model, embodying as they do the negative space of its beauty ideal: abject, deviant, and available to violence. And yet, for all of this, they have a bearing: holding themselves together, holding themselves beautifully, holding each other...

In Bearing, Goliath summons the dark radiance and dissident desires of black feminist and queer erotics, claiming tenderness, intimacy, pleasure and love.