Stare (6/6), 2008. Archival pigment print, 31.49 x 31.49 in


Ballenesque

A Psychological Journey


Through May 30, 2026


THROCKMORTON FINE ART

145 East 57th Street, 3rd Floor, NY, NY 10022

throckmorton-nyc.com


All works are courtesy of the artist



By Benjamin Genocchio



Throckmorton Fine Art is presenting the work of Roger Ballen, the South African artist. It is a brave show because Ballen is one of those artists who divide viewers: some are smitten by his Surrealist, collage imagery with intimations of mortality, while others find it dark and gross. 


I have been an admirer of the work ever since I first met the artist decades ago in Cape Town. He was very much like his artwork — eccentric, unconventional, and idiosyncratic, yet charmingly odd and unusual. His work can be disturbing, even scary at times, but it always also feels lighthearted and entirely original. 


These days, Ballen is a major figure in the art world. He has exhibited internationally for decades and has published over 25 books of photography, the most recent of which is titled “Spirits and Spaces,” 2025. He has made prize-winning films and his photographs are in the collections of international art museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Tate Modern, London.



Left: Basket Boy, Rwanda (2/10), 1982. Archival pigment print, 15.74 x 11 in  Right: Tommy, Samson and a Mask (30/35), 2000. Silver gelatin print, 15.74 x 15.74 in



The exhibition at Throckmorton features nearly 40 photographs, all of them selected by and on loan from the artist. They span from 1969 to 2025, and together track his evolution from a documentary realist art photographer focused on marginalized African communities, visible in a work like “Basket Boy, Rwanda,” 1982, to a more recent interest in staged Surrealistic juxtapositions in which people, animals, props, and objects inhabit drab interiors, often with hand-drawn backdrops.




Left: Puppies in Fishtank (34/35), 2000. Silver gelatin print, 15.74 x 15.74 in  Right: Break Free (3/5), 2019. Archival pigment print, 31.49 x 31.49 in



“We are thrilled to introduce viewers to the hauntingly beautiful world of Roger Ballen,” says the gallery owner Spencer Throckmorton. “His ability to transform the mundane into the monumental — and the unsettling into the profound — is unmatched. Bringing Ballenesque to our gallery marks a significant milestone in our commitment to showcasing masterworks of contemporary photography.”


Ballen’s work is conventionally described as being about “the human psyche.” This may well be true, but the images themselves are often not easy to like. There is usually something creepy about them: he is fascinated with scary masks, masking, disfigurement, death, and decay. His obsession with oblique, strange, set-up scenarios is unsettled and unsettling.




Left: No Exit (2/3), 2019. Archival pigment print, 31.49 x 31.49 in  Right: Baffled (3/5), 2020. Archival pigment print, 31.49 x 31.49 in



Nonetheless, it feels like something important is going on here. Many of his images, though weird, elicit an undeniable sense of curiosity, even admiration. Take the Surrealistic work “Puppies in Fishtank”, 2000. The photograph, one of several that he has made showing cats and dogs in glass containers, juxtaposes the animals with a disembodied man’s head and illegible graffiti scratched on a back wall. The meaning is unclear, but it's utterly engaging.


New works “No Exit” (2019) and “Baffled” (2020) also play with interesting staged juxtapositions of objects, images, and text, but, again, meaning is ambiguous. “Stare,” 2008, is one of the best images here, not to mention one of the most frightening: two faces, alien and abstracted to little more than piercing, menacing pupils in bulging sockets, stare out at the viewer. You feel like you are being spied on, watched through a window in silence. 


Many of these images stay with you long after leaving the exhibition. I am interested in that quality because it suggests Ballen is an artist of honesty, originality, and purpose. It feels like the inside of his mind has been disgorged for us to see. Not everyone will love this show, but the importance and impact of the work are undeniable.




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