Hank Willis Thomas | Forever Now

For his first solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery in South Africa in over a decade, Hank Willis Thomas presents new works that probe how we see, remember, and participate in shared histories. The exhibition brings together text-based lenticular works and retroreflective pieces collaging archival visuals, alongside sculptural and installation works that speak to Thomas’s broader public-art practice and his ongoing interest in recontextualising familiar forms.

As with his debut Johannesburg exhibition, History Doesn’t Laugh, Thomas approaches the South African context with deliberate care, setting the African-American experience in conversation with South Africa’s own histories of struggle, aspiration, and visual culture. Forever Now offers South African audiences a rare encounter with an artist who has become a defining figure in public art across America, while opening new points of connection across geographies and generations.

“Love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite,” Nelson Mandela once wrote – an idea that reverberates throughout Thomas’s practice. Thomas has long spoken of the enduring power of love and its extraordinary impact, often describing his work as a “call to action, or call to love.” This idea anchors the exhibition and becomes particularly visible in a major new variation of his iconic work Love Rules. Honouring his cousin Songha Willis, who was murdered in Philadelphia in 2000, the illuminated sculpture cycles through shifting letters to form different messages of love, including “love over rules,” echoing Wilis’ last recorded message. Installed publicly at the Brooklyn Museum in another iteration, Love Rules (Horizon Blue) proposes love as a mutable force shaped by circumstance and collective will.