Twenty years after his first exhibition with Goodman Gallery, Mikhael Subotzky returns with A Johannesburg Landscape, a layered portrait of the city assembled from new and reconfigured images that find form in paintings, photographs and Sticky-tape Transfers. Johannesburg – fragmented, contradictory, continually reinventing itself – is both the exhibition’s subject and its structure: a complex set of interlocking typologies that Subotzky dismantles and reconstructs.

In 2005, when Subotzky – a recent fine art graduate – was introduced to Goodman founder Linda Givon, she insisted on taking his photographic works to Art Basel that year, where everything sold. A year later, Die Vier Hoeke and Umjiegwana, his unflinching study of South Africa’s prison system, was presented at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg alongside a satellite exhibition at the Women’s Jail on Constitution Hill. This marked the beginning of a global career that has seen his work enter the collections of, among many others, the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum and Guggenheim in New York, the Tate and V&A Museums in London and Centre Pompidou in Paris. Following Liza Essers’ acquisition of the gallery in 2008, artist and gallery matured alongside one another. Throughout these two decades Subotzky’s practice has remained defined by a sustained enquiry into what images do rather than simply what they depict – into time and its effects, and the ever-present possibility of revision.