ROSE SHAKINOVSKY

Following her 2024 solo exhibition ‘Unutterable’, RoseShakinovsky returns to Goodman’s London Gallery with aseries of oil paintings that transmute current media imagesof social, political and ecological disasters into enigmaticabstractions.

The references are daily digital news images ranging fromthe insurrection that took hold in Haiti in 2023, resultingin an escalation of violence and displacement of citizens,to the current Washington protests of February 2025.Many works focus on global climate disasters such asHurricane Beryl in Grenada in 2024 and the heavy rainfallsthat caused landslides in the Southern region of Ethiopiathat same year. Shakinovsky subjects these images todigital manipulation, using basic computer filters, untilunexpected abstract forms emerge to replace but notalter the underlying composition or the existing colourplacement of the original. At times, it may be hours orweeks before the “right” image to translate into paintreveals itself through this filtering process. The sourcematerial is therefore generated from political/social-media images rather than through self-expression orformal abstraction. She refers to this as a process thatreveals “parallel realities” that maintain the essence ofthe tragic source material, while creating an entirely newvisual language that escapes traditional abstract paintingcategories. Ironically, it is a form of photorealism, althoughShakinovsky sees the process as more aligned to thedevotional monastic discipline of reproducing manuscriptsor Zen practice.

Shakinovsky says, “The chosen image is also therefore acollaboration with the computer, as my role is only one ofrecognition and choice, rather than creation. I choose animage at the instant when the chance overlaid filter-effectunintentionally escapes the generic graphic computerlanguage and subverts it into analogue, with subtle painterly qualities, into a strange, indecipherable visualpoetry. Conceptually, it’s important then to flip the processand render these digitally produced abstract chance effectsinto time-based hand-crafted oil painting.”

In ‘Saint Cecilia’, Shakinovsky references Quattrocentodepictions of the music patron saint’s martyrdom. Even asshe suffers torture in boiling oil, Cecilia continued singing,a singular symbol of physical and emotional suffering thatresonates with the effects of various forms of contemporaryviolence, persecution and cruelty. The paintings, however,are not tortured but calm and beautiful, creating a space forcontemplation and listening.

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Rose Shakinovsky’s (b. 1953, Johannesburg) work defies anystylistic category as it consists of work that ranges from there-presentation and decontextualisation of found objects,found images and found situations, to delicately paintedabstractions and ironic bronzes. She is interested in thelimits and breakdown of language constructs, whetherverbal, textual or pictorial.

The work concerns itself with current political andsocial discourses while simultaneously referencing andreconstructing art historical edifices. Her present researchis concerned with discourses pertaining to the posthuman,transhuman and the consequences of climate change.

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Notable solo and group exhibitions include: MuseoNovecento Florence: “Parable” with Claire Gavronsky(2025), Viewing Room exhibitions, Goodman Gallery,London, (2024); Io e Me. Autoritratti nel Lockdown. Sala 1,Centro Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2021);Speechless with Claire Gavronsky, Goodman Gallery, CapeTown (2018); Right to the Future, Museum of 20th and 21stCentury Art, St Petersburg (2017); COLORI: L’emozionedei COLORI nell’arte, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’ArteContemporanea, Rivoli (2017); Assessing Abstraction, SouthAfrican National Gallery (2017); Colour Theory with ClaireGavronsky, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2014); DakarBiennale, Dakar with Claire Gavronsky (2010).

Her work has been included in significant collectionsincluding, Female Artists of the Mougins Museum(FAMM), France; Iziko South African National Gallery, andConstitutional Court of South Africa.