In his first solo exhibition with Gallery 1957, internationally celebrated, Soweto-born artist Johannes Phokela delves into the mindset that drives the pursuit of greater wealth through the acquisition of, and lucrative trade in, minerals.

This new body of work closely follows Only Sun the Sky Knows How I Feel (A Lucid Dream), Phokela’s major solo exhibition at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, which shed light on his practice, process, thinking and intentions, and was organised around the artist’s obsessive engagement with pictures and his concerns with pictorial traditions and images as tools to critique social mores and corrupt value systems in the aftermath of empire.

The problem may not be obvious until the catastrophe has occurred. In these seismic paintings, Phokela pursues a covert fault line that runs beneath the high-impact narratives – the dire political ramifications of mining, its exploitative impact on people, land and ecosystems. The artist visually interrogates the impulse that precedes and exceeds the thrust of the spade or the drone of the drill. What does it look like – this primal, burning hunger for wealth that fuels the extractive drive? This obsessive mineral bedazzlement that feeds the endless, mounting dumps and slurries of toxic human history? These paintings invite the viewer to go there – to dwell in the basic, intrinsic human will to mine.

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