A research report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in History of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg / In this research report I look at how the Goodman Gallery has played a role in the construction of cultural capital around the contemporary South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky (1981). Unpacking Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital” (1986: 243), and applying it to the South African art industry, I explore the direct impact that commercial galleries have on the building of artists’ careers through acts that result in the construction of cultural capital, and in what capacity they do this. Little has been written in South African art history about local commercial art galleries, and my interest in the role that they play in the construction of art history stems from my own involvement in this sector, as a commercial art gallery curator. As businesses, these institutions have profitable ambitions, and by successfully promoting the artists they represent, they are affecting the course of South African art history. Due to the potentially vast nature of this subject I have chosen to focus on one contemporary artist, Mikhael Subotzky, and his relationship with the one South African gallery he has been affiliated to throughout his entire professional career, the Goodman Gallery. As much as every person’s life is different, every person’s career is different too, and in this way I cannot use Subotzky’s career trajectory to explain all other contemporary South African artists’ careers, but I do believe that the impact that commercial galleries can have on the cultural capital surrounding artists in South Africa is a topic that should be explored further. I argue that there are various ways of gauging the cultural capital surrounding an artist in the South African art industry, and that one can look at various aspects of an artist’s career and assess their cultural capital. I substantiate this claim in this paper, and indeed why it is important to understand what role the commercial gallery can play in this construction

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the degree of Masters of Arts in Fine Arts (MAFA) Johannesburg, 2017 / This dissertation aims to examine Gerhard Richter and Serge Nitegeka’s artistic practices, in order to understand and identify how artists can potentially use space as a medium and contextualise my own practice within this realm. I position the conventions and principles of space through reference to French theorists’ Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault. The thesis begins with a brief overview of the window as a painterly motif and spatially familiar everyday device in the introduction. In the first chapter, I explore the surface and reflection of the medium of glass, the colour gray, the monochrome, as well as the pictorial, in Gerhard Richter’s Eight Gray (2002). The second chapter examines the role of the frame or line in Serge Nitegeka’s Black Lines (2012), as an environment of experience that relies on painted diagrams and the illusion of perspectival space. The third chapter observes a shift in the manner in which Richter and Nitegeka experiment and extend their practices through an engagement with the mirror and the door, respectively, as ways of exploring the threshold. Finally, I discuss my own practice and reflect on the exhibition Through the Extent (2015), which was submitted as the practical component of this research. / XL2018