Artist Database

Mikhael Subotzky is a Cape Town-born, Johannesburg-based multi-media artist who works in photography, film, installation, collage, and painting. His art is concerned with storytelling; critically engaging with narrative and representation. Subotzky graduated from the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2004, where he acted as a part-time lecturer in photography from 2004 to 2006. Between 2005 and 2008, he developed and ran a photographic workshop inside Pollsmoor Prison, Cape Town, and this is where his early career was founded: on photographic projects that explored incarceration and punishment in South Africa.

In 2012, Subotzky was named the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year for Visual Arts and Okwui Enwezor chose to include his work in the 2015 Venice Biennale. He has been widely exhibited both locally and internationally including the solo exhibition Epilogue at Goodman Gallery, London, UK (2022) and recent group exhibitions Global(e) Resistance at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021); Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at the Barbican, London, UK (2020); and Inheritance: Recent Video Art from Africa at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA (2019). He also collaborated with Patrick Waterhouse on a multi-year series, Ponte City, which was presented at Art Basel Unlimited in 2018 and acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), CA, USA.

In addition to SFMOMA, Subotzky’s photographs can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY, USA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA; the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town; the Johannesburg Art Museum; and in Sir Elton John’s private photography collection.