Matthew Brown

Matthew Brown is pleased to present Triumph of the Southern Suburbs, a solo exhibition of paintings, drawings and etchings by Blake Daniels. The paintings vibrate with animated color and dynamic marks, thick surfaces give way to create dreamlike and expressive compositions, pictorial plains which examine the private interior and socio-political conditions under which we establish, form and adapt our identities. Living and working between the United States and South Africa, their work draws inspiration from traditions of storytelling, queer cultural practices, art history and personal memories, coalescing into divergent perspectives upon our social and political landscapes.

Daniels subject matter revolves largely around Johannesburg and its subversive queer communities, weaving together vibrant irreducible narratives as a means of exploring the generative ways in which we mourn, heal and conjure life within the seemingly improbable worlds’ we inhabit together. The exhibition is Daniels inaugural solo exhibition with Matthew Brown and is accompanied with text written by Dr. Nosipho Mngomezulu.

“The view from my window frame is an extraction, but not exactly a slice through time. Rather it cuts across a different axis, to examine the continuity of place. If I were to flip it from the vertical to a horizontal plane, the rectangular field it pegs out could be an archaeological site of sorts, to dig into with the imagination, and sift its contents for nuggets of the past.”

– Kirsty Bell writing in The Undercurrents

Submerged landscapes resurface in Nick Goss’ work, offering glimpses into speculative futures. He collapses time and space in his paintings by filtering images of London and personal memories with documentary photographs and found imagery to create places that are simultaneously familiar and intangible. Taking its title from The Undercurrents, Kirsty Bell’s 2022 palimpsestic memoir of Berlin, this exhibition centres on the precariousness of images—where linear narrative is disrupted by combining screen-print with painting, the past with the present. This sense of displacement is sharpened by the quiet takeover of the natural world and a heightened colour palette that borders on a dream or apparition.

Deluges are reoccurring themes in Goss’ paintings, a subject that holds rich connections to art history, literature, film and mythology, and is increasingly witnessed in global news coverage. JG Ballard’s 1962 apocalyptic novel The Drowned World is a constant anchor in his work in its descriptions of a future London as a tropical lagoon described as “two interlocking worlds apparently suspended at some junction in time.”