Jo'burg art picks: February 10 2012

Johannesburg’s most established commercial gallery celebrates the new year with an enormous group show mysteriously titled Advance/...Notice.

The mystery is solved when one reads the gallery statement: “As we advance into a new calendar year, this exhibition gives notice of innovations from some of our artists who are already familiar, and of our new ventures into an intellectual exchange with artists we are working with for the first time.”

Do not expect an exploration of any specific theme, but rather a magnificent hodgepodge of work by some really great names: David Gold­blatt, African-American Hank Willis Thomas, Israeli Sigalit Landau, Hasan and Husain Essop, Moshekwa Langa, Mikhael Subotzky, Sue Williamson, William Kentridge, Kendell Geers, Candice Breitz and dancer Nelisiwe Xaba, a new addition to the Goodman stable.

Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, until February 25. Tel: 011 788 1113.

■ Artist Nhlanhla Xaba died, tragically, in a fire in 2003.

Sadly, it was in the Artist’s Proof Studio—of which he was co-founder—that he met his end. Born in Pimville, Soweto, in 1960, he worked his way up from labourer to fine printmaker in three decades. By the early 1990s he was a lecturer at the grassroots art school Fuba, and at his own studio in downtown Jo’burg. In 1998 Xaba became a Standard Bank Young Artist award-winner and it seemed like his career was made. Art lovers can now experience Xaba’s sensitive, though stock-African, imagery at Gallery AOP at the trendy 44 Stanley Avenue Mall.

Gallery AOP, 44 Stanley Avenue, Braamfontein Werf, until February 18.