Artist: Gabrielle Goliath

Goodman Gallery New York presents Berenice, a solo exhibition by acclaimed South African artist Gabrielle Goliath. Featured in the show are 22 photographic works from the artist’s long-term commemorative series, Berenice, including three newly-produced portraits titled Berenice 40-42. The images sit in tender relation to the series of 11 Berenice portraits (Berenice 39-49) currently showing at the New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging exhibition (14 September 2025 – 17 January 2026) at the Museum of Modern Art. The Goodman Gallery exhibition coincides with Personal Accounts opening at the Museum of Modern Art PS1 (6 November 2025 – 16 March 2026), presenting a unique opportunity for audiences in New York to encounter her practice in three spaces across the city.

Initiated in 2010, Berenice is an ongoing work of memorialisation, recalling Berenice, a close childhood friend of the artist’s, who on Christmas Eve 1991 was shot and killed in a ‘domestic incident’. The images themselves are starkly beautiful: at once haunting and provocative in their address. For each portrait in the series, a woman or LGBTIQ+ individual of colour offers themself as a surrogate presence, ‘standing in’ for Berenice as each of them marks another year of her life unlived. In this way, a growing community of artists, writers, musicians, activists, mothers and friends join Goliath in what she calls “a life-work of mourning”. Rooted in a black feminist politics of care, Berenice reaffirms black girlhood as both loveable and grievable.