Throckmorton Fine Art presents its first solo exhibition of works by the internationally acclaimed artist Roger Ballen. Running from April 16 through May 16, 2026, Roger Ballen | Ballenesque is a comprehensive survey featuring nearly 40 works dating from 1969-2025 spanning over five decades of the artist’s provocative career. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to witness Ballen’s evolution from stark documentary realism to a dark, clever, and profoundly philosophical documentary fiction.
Born in New York City in 1950 and based in South Africa since the mid-1970s, Roger Ballen has achieved international recognition by pioneering an aesthetic that blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. While his early work in the 1970s and ’80s was firmly rooted in traditional documentary photography of rural South Africa, his style shifted after 2000 toward a complex, hybrid, and staged approach. By integrating drawing, painting, collage, and sculptural elements into elaborate installations, Ballen creates multi-layered images that explore the shadow side of the human psyche. In these often-improvised scenarios, human subjects frequently vanish or appear only as disembodied fragments, resulting in a signature style where the distinction between physical medium and psychological depth is intentionally dissolved. Visitors will witness the evolution of Ballen’s vision: from the stark, empathetic portraits of marginalized communities to his later, more abstract documentary fiction works where human subjects, animals, and stray props and objects interact within claustrophobic, hand-drawn interiors.
The exhibition features iconic images from his most celebrated series, including Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa (1986); Platteland: Images from Rural South Africa (1994); Outland (2000); Shadow Chamber (2005); and Asylum of the Birds (2014).
Ballen has published over 25 books internationally, most recently Spirits and Spaces (Thames and Hudson, September 2025), his first book of color work; and Inferno (Postcart Edizioni, November 2025), sixty-eight photographs by Ballen corresponding to the thirty-four cantos of Dante Alighieri. He has also been the creator of several acclaimed and exhibited short films linked to his photographic work. In 2022, Ballen was one of the artists who represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale. His works are in more than 50 major international museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Tate Modern, London. Ballen founded and leads the Inside Out Centre for the Arts and the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography in Johannesburg, which promote International and African issues through art and education.
“We are thrilled to introduce viewers to the hauntingly beautiful world of Roger Ballen,” says 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.”
Roger Ballen | Ballenesque
April 16 -May 16, 2026
Throckmorton Fine Art
145 E. 57th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10022
www.throckmorton-nyc.com
