October 2026
Trevyn McGowan
Interview by Dan Golden
Dan Golden: Congratulations on your new Tribeca gallery space — opening with solo shows by Mmangaliso Nzuza and Usha Seejarim feels like a real statement. For readers meeting Southern Guild for the first time, how would you introduce the gallery and its programme?
Trevyn McGowan: Southern Guild is a contemporary art gallery founded in Cape Town in 2008 by my husband Julian and I. At its heart, it has always been about artists with singular voices: people whose work is culturally grounded, materially fearless, and deeply connected to who they are and how they see the world.
We work across painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, and mixed media, but we're not interested in defining the programme by discipline. What connects the artists is the distinctiveness of their work and the rigour with which they pursue it. We are interested in artists who are continually testing the possibilities of their chosen medium and developing a visual language that is unmistakably their own.
Cape Town remains fundamental to who we are, and our Tribeca gallery gives us a permanent presence in New York from which to introduce these artists and ideas to a wider audience.
Ross Bleckner, Everyone, Someone, 2023, oil on linen, 72 × 96 inches (182.9 × 243.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist, Guild Hall, and Petzel, New York.
DG: I’d love to go back to the beginning. What were you doing before the gallery came into the picture? Do you come from an art background? What first pulled you toward this world?
TM: I started out as an actor in London and later moved into interiors and design, while Julian came from a theatre and set design background. So, we had both spent much of our working lives immersed in visual culture and creativity before returning to South Africa in 2003.
Coming home was really the catalyst. We encountered this remarkable depth of creative talent and very quickly felt there were voices here with something important to contribute to the world, but without the infrastructure around them to do that at the level they deserved. Having spent so much time working internationally, we felt we understood something about how to build those bridges.
It became our mission. We began in design, working closely with makers and developing work with them, and that eventually evolved into opening Southern Guild in 2008.
Ross Bleckner, To Speak Lower, 2023, oil on canvas, 84 × 120 inches (213.4 × 304.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist, Guild Hall, and Petzel, New York.
DG: What led you to start Southern Guild back in 2008? What was the original vision?
TM: We could see people making work that didn't fit comfortably into the existing categories. It was functional but sculptural, rooted in craft but highly conceptual, and often very technically complex. There wasn't really a context for it in South Africa at the time, particularly at the collectible end of the market.
We wanted to give people permission to go further: to experiment with material and scale, to make one-offs and limited editions, and to pursue ideas without first asking whether there was already a market for them. We were also very conscious of not conforming to an outside idea of what African art or design was supposed to look like.
In those early years, that meant building much of the infrastructure ourselves – production, exhibitions, writing, photography, fairs, logistics, collector education, and museum introductions. So much has changed since 2008, but the underlying principle hasn't: our responsibility is to the artist and to the work.
Ross Bleckner, Two Chests and a Brain I, 2026, oil on canvas, 72 × 84 inches (182.9 × 213.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Photo: Jason Mandela.
DG: When you think about the artists you’ve chosen to work with over the years, what tends to pull you toward someone? Is there something you’re instinctively looking for?
TM: I often ask myself, “Could only this artist have made this work?” That's probably the simplest test. There needs to be a visual language so particular to that person that you couldn't mistake it for somebody else's.
There also has to be a foundation of excellence – in the labour, the process, the material intelligence, and the commitment to the work. We represent a number of photographers, for example, but each uses the medium in a completely different way. It's not the discipline that interests us; it's what that individual is doing with it.
And then there is the person themselves. We're drawn to artists who are very connected to themselves emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually, but who remain open to learning, change, and possibility. You have to be able to challenge one another and be surprised. At its best, it feels like we're on an adventure together.
Installation view, Ross Bleckner, Octopus, Petzel, New York, September 17—October 24, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.
Installation view, Ross Bleckner, Octopus, Petzel, New York, September 17—October 24, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.
Installation view, Ross Bleckner, Octopus, Petzel, New York, September 17—October 24, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.
DG: Tell me about the materials you work with—I was reading you use a blowtorch?
RB: It started as an experiment in drawing through destruction—painting a light color under a dark color, then wiping away the dark layer with fire to create an interesting, organic line as the paint accumulates and wears away.
I think of my studio as a wacky laboratory. One day I’ll be mixing all these different potions, pigments, and mediums, and something will mutate and bubble up. Hopefully it will be something new, never seen before.
DG: I love the idea of your studio as a laboratory. What inspired you to start making your own paint versus going out and getting some Gamblin?
RB: Well, I do that, too. I mix regular paint into mine as a binder, so it holds together and conserves. I’ve always been interested in how paint captures and reflects light. In graduate school, I watched videos of Richard Serra throwing molten lead, and that inspired me to mix graphite into my paint to give the paintings a kind of shine. It’s a kind of miracle how certain pigment blends do what they do.
It’s almost like the awe, the divinity in a way, the grace of when you look into the sky, and you feel the infiniteness of everything and the beauty. So I use that metaphorically as the image of light coming out of the dark. I always start with dark, and I go toward the light.
DG: I like that—it’s positive.
“I think of my studio as a wacky laboratory. One day I’ll be mixing all these different potions, pigments, and mediums, and something will mutate and bubble up. Hopefully it will be something new, never seen before.”
DG: When I was painting, I never had a set idea of where the paintings would go. It always felt like a high-wire act, like I was either onto something great, or what I was doing was shit.
RB: Well, that’s the way my mind goes.
DG: How do you handle that mentally?
RB: A lot of that has to do with why I make those small paintings. They’re the way I build up the courage. I experiment to give myself confidence that maybe something could work out.
DG: Ah! How do you think of scale then?
RB: For me, scale has to do with experiential quality. In a way, I’m making mood paintings, so I need space to create the atmosphere I’m looking for. But I’m also perfectly happy with paintings that are three by two feet or even 20 by 10 inches. A lot of the small ones are tryouts for bigger ones. When you have a show, you want to create an impact.
DG: That makes total sense. I mean, large paintings are immersive; they envelop the viewer.
RB: Most of my big paintings are around human scale. I tend to prefer vertical over horizontal because it reaches upward. Even though I don’t believe in mystical nonsense. The child in you holds onto those early feelings of awe.
Installation view, Ross Bleckner, Never The Less, Guild Hall, August 29—October 25, 2026. Courtesy of the artist, Guild Hall, and Petzel, New York.
Ross Bleckner, Untitled, oil on paper, 16 × 11 inches (40.64 x 27.94 cm). Courtesy of the artist, Madoo Conservancy, and Petzel, New York.
Ross Bleckner, Untitled, oil on paper, 16 × 11 inches (40.64 x 27.94 cm). Courtesy of the artist, Madoo Conservancy, and Petzel, New York.
DG: Can we step back in time and talk about your work from the 1980s?
RB: Sure. In the early 1980s, I made abstract, optical paintings that were almost like a dialogue; the space between the painting and the viewer became the image, because it was about vibrational, sensory experience. Anyway, I was making those paintings, and then AIDS hit New York pretty hard, and I felt like I had to address what I saw around me, especially as a gay man. So I became an activist. I became president of an organization called ACRIA, the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America, and we did research, clinical trials, outreach and education in minority communities, and prevention. It included many doctors and scientists. It was a great organization. It folded eventually into Gay Men's Health Crisis.
My point is that I felt like I couldn’t keep thinking about all these abstract ideas, apart from the reality. So my paintings became very commemorative—they dealt with friends I’d known: memorials, names, numbers. You know, you live your life, and the world intervenes in ways so monumental that you can’t keep doing what you were doing. You have to acknowledge the realities that underlie how you think about the world, and that comes out in your heart.
DG: The shift then was from the optical stripe paintings, which were painterly and conceptual, to work that was addressing what was actually going on?
RB: Yes—I stopped making the optical stripe paintings, and I started doing more representational paintings, with trophies and lights and names and numbers. And then I started going back and forth, obviously, because I’m dealing with my mind and the way I think. I moved on, but a lot of times I stayed, and I think biology became kind of an overriding adhesive. Even still—a lot of my paintings deal with the body, because that’s where we live.
DG: I love hearing about that transition—you getting more personal, finding your authentic voice. So much art feels surface-level—there’s the physical surface, but no depth. What you’re describing feels like what an artist is supposed to do: listen to their voice, not just produce something for the sake of the surface.
RB: I can’t do that. It’s just not the way I think. I would get bored. So I’m always looking for the way through the work I’m doing—where is it taking me? What do you want to communicate? How do you want a viewer to respond to your work? I want them to feel something, to have an emotional reaction.
My work tends toward the melancholic. And I say that with a certain degree of humor, because life tends toward the melancholic. But you know what? We all find moments of joy. We all find moments of relief. We all try our best to make things have meaning. That’s the light through the dark. It might be a little childish, but I think in the end being an artist is a little childish. You go into a room and play with minerals and other stuff that’s been crushed up.
Ross Bleckner, The Centuries, 2018, oil on paper, 72 × 108 inches (182.9 × 274.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist, Guild Hall, and Petzel, New York.
DG: Stepping back even further, you went to CalArts for graduate school in the 70s, right? As an East Coaster, what drew you to CalArts?
RB: Yes—I was there for two years for grad school, and stayed another year. That was 1970 to 1973. I grew up in New York and went to NYU for undergrad, so I wanted to leave for a few years. What drew everybody there was the reputation it had developed very quickly. Chuck Close was one of my teachers at NYU, and he told me, “There’s this cool school in California. Maybe you should check into it.” So I applied, got in, and went. It was intense.
DG: What was Chuck Close like as a teacher?
RB: Chuck and I became friends. He was gregarious and generous; he was very involved in supporting younger artists.
DG: I remember being a bit surprised to see him show up in the movie Six Degrees of Separation. You’ve been in a couple of movies yourself, right?
RB: Yeah, I played a lawyer in As Good as It Gets. James L. Brooks was a collector and came to my studio to see how I worked, then asked me to be in the movie. My artwork was also featured in Curb Your Enthusiasm. I love Larry David—I always feel like I live right at the intersection of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David.
DG: How would you describe your own humor?
RB: A little dark, dry, and complainy—but ultimately accepting of things once you’ve complained enough.
“We all find moments of joy. We all find moments of relief. We all try our best to make things have meaning. That’s the light through the dark.”
DG: Going back to CalArts for a moment, what was intense about it?
RB: People were very competitive and worked hard. Everyone was ambitious; nobody came there to lounge around. Everyone tried new things, except me—I didn’t try much new. I just tried to learn how to paint and stuck with painting, as Eric Fischl did. Everyone was playing with video and interdisciplinary forms, and I just felt that if I looked at a video camera, I’d have a breakdown. I’m the same way now. My mind doesn’t get around technology, so I use as little as I can. I’m never going to do AI paintings—it’s way above my pay grade.
DG: In an increasingly AI-driven world, the human hand and touch become even more essential and rare.
RB: AI does a very good semblance of the hand, though. David invited me over to see some paintings he did with AI, and I kept pointing to the parts I liked. He said, “Oh, that’s the AI part.” I thought it was the painterly part he had done around it, and I told him, “No, I like this part way better.”
Ross Bleckner, Where Is My Body, 2025, oil on linen, 72 × 96 inches (182.9 × 243.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Photo: Jason Mandela.
DG: Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about your partner, Eric Freeman, who passed away a few years ago. His work at Guild Hall looked beautiful.
RB: He started painting late. He didn’t really think about being an artist, but I knew he was a terrific artist. He was interested in a lot of things, and he was very gentle. He painted things in the world, like James Turrell, Dan Flavin, or Richard Serra. The way they moved and undulated—his paintings don’t stay still. The quality of light in his painting is ravishing. It just glows. He started late, and he was doing okay, and unfortunately he died.
DG: I can’t even imagine what that’s been like for you.
RB: Grief is something you just learn to live with. There’s no solution, there’s no fixing it. That goes back to basic Buddhist teachings: we all experience sickness, old age, and death. You know, you only have so much time if you really think you have something to say.
Most successful artists I know are extremely disciplined. Look at Jean-Michel Basquiat—as fucked up as he was, he died at 27, but he produced so much work. He obviously worked his ass off. It’s an artist’s responsibility to keep moving forward and changing. Would Jackson Pollock have kept doing drip paintings for another 20 years? They would have looked idiotic.
DG: Speaking of Pollock, you live on the same road in Springs where Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner lived, right?
RB: Not only do I live on the road, but my driveway is very close to where he crashed his car and got killed. Willem de Kooning lived just a block away, too. I was actually in de Kooning’s studio about a year before he passed away, to watch him work. I feel like he had dementia by then—he was off in another world, floating around. The paintings were so minimal because there was nothing left to say. He was disappearing. I feel like he was representing disappearance.
DG: It has been a pleasure talking with you, Ross. One last question: when someone stands in front of your paintings, what do you hope they find there?
RB: I want my paintings to have a little piece of heaven in them.
Ross Bleckner
Octopus
Petzel
New York
September 17—October 24, 2026