With roger ballen.! drawing meets photography, we turns our lens on one of contemporary photography’s most influential figures. Roger Ballen, who has lived and worked in South Africa since 1982, works across photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and film. Drawing has played an especially transformative role in his work since the late 1990s, as line has moved increasingly to the foreground of his photographic language. Drawn faces, animals and ambiguous forms appear alongside wires, marks and other graphic elements across his photographs, painted-over Polaroids and large-scale drawings.
Spanning the years 1998 through 2025, this exhibition features over a hundred and twenty works, charting a course through key series such as Outland, Shadow Chamber, Boarding House, Asylum of the Birds, and Roger’s Rats. It also includes Spirits and Spaces, Roger Ballen’s first series in which he works extensively in color. Across these bodies of work, interior spaces, animals, fragments of the human body, doll parts, drawings and objects serve as cast members in an idiosyncratic visual theater.