‘It’s a crazy thing to be doing,’ says Mikhael Subotzky. The artist’s recent shift into painting seems to baffle him as much now, as he speaks to me over Zoom from a hotel in Cape Town, as it did when I met him in his Johannesburg studio in September 2019, where he showed me some of the
White on White canvases included in his first display of paintings, ‘Massive Nerve Corpus’, at Goodman Gallery’s Johannesburg branch earlier that year. These large-scale semi-abstract canvases, layered with strips of medical tape, are certainly a far cry from the documentary photographs with which the artist made his name in the 2000s; Subotzky himself wrote derisively in 2019 of ‘privileged white men […] with their oversized paintings and well-worked mythologies’. But it’s perhaps precisely for this reason that he followed the ‘crazy’ impulse to paint. Over the course of the past 15 years Subotzky has developed from an acute observer of societal injustice in South Africa i