Guy Simpson | Was Here

Goodman Gallery Johannesburg is pleased to present Guy’s Simpson’s Was Here his first gallery presentation in the city where he was born and raised. Emerging from a network of artist-run spaces in Cape Town – where he now lives – Simpson’s practice sits at the unusual intersection of documentation and abstraction, translating photographic record into dense, materially layered and extraordinarily innovative and often sculptural paintings. By focussing on the minutiae of the spaces we inhabit, he offers an understated and beautifully tactile meditation on the transitions of places and communities.

Forming part of Goodman’s newly reimagined Working Title series, which offers a year-round incubator programme for local South African artists led by Goodman curator Nandi Jakuja, Was Here is presented in the Johannesburg gallery’s viewing room space. It brings together a small but powerful group of paintings created by Simpson towards the end of 2025. Returning to Johannesburg to show in this context carries particular resonance for the artist: the school bus that took him from the suburb of Sydenham where he lived to the Jewish day school he eventually attended, King David Victory Park, passed Goodman Gallery every morning.

Born in the year that South Africa officially became a democracy, Simpson has witnessed acute examples of Johannesburg’s shifting suburban landscape: shrinking and consolidating diasporic communities; religious and ethnic enclaves tightening after extensive relocation; generational shifts in belief, belonging and identity. Growing up in Orange Grove and the bordering suburb of Sydenham – where he spent most of his school-going years – Simpson experienced these transitions first-hand. Orange Grove – its evocative name recalling the orange farms of a century ago, rather than its more recent blue-collar reality – was home to Jewish, Italian, Portuguese and Afrikaans communities, many of whom have since dispersed. In an earlier body of work, Simpson mapped this changing terrain through paintings of decaying interior and exterior walls, where peeling paint and ruptured plaster operate as inadvertent urban archives.