CHRIS SOAL
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
︎ Surface tension, 2024
︎ Finds taken for wonders, 2023
︎ Remains to be seen, 2022
︎ Elegy, 2021
︎ As below so above, 2021
︎ Margins of Error, 2021


SELECTED WORKS
︎ 2023
︎ 2022
︎ 2021
︎ 2020

︎ 2019
︎ 2018
︎ 2017


EXHIBITIONS


WHATIFTHEWORLD GALLERY
SOLO EXHIBITION
2024
3 FEB - 9 MAR




PIERO ATCHUGARRY GALLERY
SOLO EXHIBITION
2023
15 APR - 29 JUL



EDUARDO SECCI GALLERY
SOLO EXHIBITION
2022
21 SEPT - 11 NOV



THE NIROX
FOUNDATION

GROUP EXHIBITION
2021
MAY - DEC




THE NIROX FOUNDATION
GROUP EXHIBITION
2021
MAY - DEC




AS BELOW SO ABOVE

WHATIFTHEWORLD
SOLO EXHIBITION
2021
28 JAN - 1 MAY

SURFACE TENSION


WHATIFTHEWORLD GALLERY
SOLO EXHIBITION
3 FEBRUARY - 9 MARCH 2024
Surface tension | 2024 | Installation View


WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present Surface Tension, a solo exhibition by Chris Soal.

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange!

- Ovid Metamorphoses

Chris Soal’s latest body of work, Surface Tension 2024, is a development of his practice of the transformation or metamorphoses of quotidian objects and materials. Soal is well known for his, almost compulsive, interest with how everyday objects and materials can be rendered into uncanny yet familiar forms. Soal’s work has always engaged in the process of what Viktor Shklovsky referred to as ‘defamiliarization’. Of rendering the familiar and prosaic into the poetic. Toothpicks are metamorphosized into the gestures of fur and movement; bottlecaps into writhing serpentine forms. Soal engages in the form of art that renews our perception of objects while evoking an intriguing formal dialectic or double voice.

His latest exhibition is a further exploration of his established practice with a new focus on the material of sandpaper. Soal first began to see the possibilities of using sandpaper as a medium of expression when he was a student sanding down wood. He noticed that the image of woodgrain had transposed or printed itself through the sandpaper.

In Surface Tension he explores the possibilities of image making via this unique method. The images rendered (or in many senses, ‘printed’) through sandpaper, of the movement of water, create a sense of disorientation for the viewer. Works such as The Expanse (2024) and Index (2023) ask the questions: What is the material being used? What has been removed or applied to create the images? The works draw the viewer in, to establish answers, only for the viewer to have to retreat to view and consider them anew.

The images break through the surface, as if passing through a membrane, revealing the coloured backing of the sandpaper via a process of sandpapering. The partly absurd and abrasive practice of sandpapering the sandpaper to achieve the image of the fluidity of water has the resonance of a Greek myth, of a Sisyphusian absurd- like task.

In some ways it could be considered a reflection on his (now) local Cape Town environment. The sea and its wavering, rippling, and wearing repetitions has become an important part of Soal’s everyday perceptions.

Soal’s process of degrading the sandpaper to reveal the lurid industrial blues and yellows of the membrane evokes a sense of our contemporary industrial and environmental crisis. The fragility of the corroded surfaces, however, remains dialectally opposed to the imagery produced, arousing notions of a contemporary Romantic sublime — the mixing of the fear of environmental degradation with the delight of the image of nature’s beauty.

But where the sea and Cape Town have influenced his thinking in many of these images, it is his hometown of Johannesburg that has inspired several of his other works. The form of Joburg’s mine dumps, with their eroded kranses, enter the exhibition in the shape of the sculptural work The Things that Only Time will Teach You (2024) and Facet (2024). Again, Soal uses sandpaper, this time in the form of thousands of sandpaper disks, to create the rippling cylindrical effects of Joburg’s most iconic eroding structures.

Within the work there is a double voice. The disks, like the dumps, are discarded industrial waste — Soal has collected them from workshops and factories. The colour variation of the sandpaper’s membrane also becomes the simulacra of the dumps, reproducing the veins and strata of these man- made mountains. Like the dumps, The Things that Only Time will Teach You (2024), in a sense memorializes the notion of homo labourans, with all its attendant tragedies and triumphs.

To invert an idea from one of Soal’s influences, Francis Alÿs (who argued that something can create nothing), Soal suggests that what we consider to be immaterial can create something. Embedded in the exhibition is the notion that the tension of the surface, which we overlook, creates a tremulous cadence that erodes to reveal underlying forms. New, strange, poetic, and latent forms emerge from the ordinary and prosaic.


Text by Matthew Blackman







The Things that Only Time Will Teach You, 2024
Used sandpaper discs adhered with polyurethane sealant held by steel substructure, formation on wheels
271 x 174 x 137 cm








The Expanse (To See The World in a Grain of Sand)
, 2024
Woodblock impression on eroded sandpaper rolls held by acid-free tape,
secured with stainless steel pins
Sandpaper rolls: Norton P180.
Installation variable approx. 360 x 230 x 130 cm







Surface tension | 2024 | Installation View









Facet
, 2024
Used sandpaper discs adhered with polyurethane sealant on board with stainless steel sub-structure
87 x 76 x 45 cm






The City of Old (Rundown), 2024
Woodblock impression on eroded sandpaper sheets, held by acid-free tape, to be secured in place with stainless steel pins
40 Sandpaper sheets: Klingspor P150, 3M P150, Torkcraft P180.
93 x 148 cm

Edition of 3 + 2 AP




Dendrite (The Trickster Makes the World), 2024
Woodblock impression on eroded sandpaper pads held by acid-free tape, to be secured in place with secured with stainless steel pins
Sandpaper pads: Klingspor P600 and P800.
24.4 x 13.6 cm

Edition of 15 + 3 AP






Surface tension | 2024 | Installation View




Index, 2023
Glass fibre reinforced concrete with used motor car oil and rebar, woodblock impression on eroded sandpaper sheets.
Sandpaper sheets: Lukas P100, P150 and P400.
81 x 61 x 10 cm







The Cultivation of Ideas, 2024
Pine wood planks and varying grit eroded sandpaper pads.
95 x 55 x 5 cm.








The Paradox of Praxis (Sometimes Removing is Revealing), 2024

Woodblock impression on eroded sandpaper sheets held by acid-free tape, to be secured in place with stainless steel pins.
11 Sandpaper sheets: Norton P180, Lukas P800, Bosch P120, Torkcraft P180, Heddle P180.









Surface tension, 2024
Woodblock impression on eroded sandpaper sheets held by acid-free tape, to be secured in place with secured with stainless steel pins
10 Sandpaper sheets: Norton P180, Ekawet P180.
65 x 85 cm

Edition of 5 + 2 AP






Surface tension | 2024 | Installation View


︎ ARTICLE on WHATIFTHEWORLD by Matthew Blackman

FINDS TAKEN FOR WONDERS 



PIERO ATCHUGARRY GALLERY
SOLO EXHIBITION
15 APRIL - 29 JULY  2023

Finds taken for wonders | 2023 | Installation View

Piero Atchugarry Gallery is pleased to announce Finds Taken For Wonders, the debut solo-exhibition in our Miami Survey of newly represented South African artist Chris Soal.

Finds Taken For Wonders brings together key concerns in the artist’s sculptural practice, inviting viewers to reconsider their perceptual biases while challenging societal assumptions of value. Soal’s works poetically contain a deep longing to expose the destructive relationship between humankind and nature by engaging the viewer’s spatial awareness of their own body in relation to the monumental organic forms that shape these large-scale sculptures.

Through his use of discarded and mundane ephemera, Soal’s work intuitively develops the familiar to the point of the uncanny. Using conventional mass-produced objects such as beer bottle tops and bamboo toothpicks, Soal highlights the stories embedded into these found materials by extracting them from their typical context. Beer bottle tops become writhing, twisting forms, which appear almost intestinal, but in reality serve as a reminder of the excesses available to us in our modern day. These elements of marginal discard become signifiers of the socio-political and economic excrescences of our society. And yet despite all they evoke, we cannot look away from the spiraling serpentine forms, we are spellbound and challenged through wonder, prompting the question: How do we see the world anew again?
The impressive scale of Soal’s toothpick sculptures intentionally challenge viewers to see not just with the eyes, but to perceive with the body, inviting viewers to bodily consider their relation to the work. For instance, the initial soft fur or skin like appearance beckons one to move closer, allowing for an intimate

reading and intimidating closeness towards these biomorphic sculptures. It is through this phenomenological encounter that the viewer is made to contemplate the ecological ramifications of societal actions. Ultimately, by working with materials fated to be discarded, Soal’s meticulously-built toothpick sculptures reference both nature and environmental decay pleading to be empathetically recognised.


“The delight in discovery is something that has pushed my work forward ever since I have started. It is through this moment of awe that the viewer is invited into a space of agency - for now the parameters of a prior way of seeing have been dismantled, and there lies an invitation to reassess what has been relegated to the peripheral.”

- Chris Soal, Finds Taken For Wonder








Threshold, 2023
Bamboo and Birch Wood Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Ripstop Fabric
320 x 300 x 45 cm


    Finds taken for wonders | 2023 | Installation View



Reverie, 2023
Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board, with Burnt and Unburnt Bamboo and Birch Wood Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board
198 x 118 x 14 cm





Holding out, 2023
Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board, Glass Fibre Reinforced Concrete with Used Motor Car Oil and Rebar and Flat Bar
127 x 126 x 12 cm

Ensemble, 2023
Bamboo and Birch Wood Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board
255 x 228 x 33 cm

PRESS

︎ ARTICLE on Meer

REMAINS TO BE SEEN



EDUARDO SECCI GALLERY 
SOLO EXHIBITION
21 SEPTEMBER - 11 NOVEMBER 2022
Remains to be seen | 2022 | Installation View

Eduardo Secci is pleased to announce the solo show by Chris Soal in the gallery space in Milan, in Via Olmetto, from September 21 to November 11, 2022.

The exhibition brings together new and never-before-seen works by the emerging South African artist, who through sculptural practice not only wants to express a conceptual engagement with the contexts and histories of the objects and materials he uses but also re-enforces the body as a site for knowledge reception and production.

Soal's work can be considered as a social abstraction that is deeply rooted and reflective of having grown up in Johannesburg. It seeks to make a poetic statement through the simplest of ways, engaging the viewer’s spatial awareness and perception while challenging societal assumptions of value. The use of discarded and mundane ephemera, such as toothpicks and bottle caps, along with concrete, rebar, electric fencing cable, and other industrial materials, intuitively develops the familiar to the point of the uncanny.

For his first solo show in Italy and his first exhibition with the Eduardo Secci gallery, Soal has decided to investigate the legacy of Arte Povera and the connection he feels with artists such as Alberto Burri and Giuseppe Uncini, the precursor of the movement.

The repeated motifs throughout this body of work are the residual, fissure, crack, tear, singe, burn, spill, and break. The artist is interested in how entropy manifests in the man-made: the organic presents itself as a renewable force capable of resisting it, but to which we must then also forego imposing purely our agenda.
This relationship between intuition and intention revealing in the suggestions of intestinal and cerebral form is what propels his work. In an ongoing engagement with the material, Soal threaded salvaged beer bottle tops onto electric fencing cable encouraging its natural coil and twist to determine the form of the entire work.

From a socio-political point of view, the presence of beer bottle tops strewn in the streets of Johannesburg and in their resemblance to entrails, speaks to a certain attitude towards consumption and its violent excesses. The writhing and serpentine nature of the work also calls to mind mythical figures such as Medusa and the Gorgons.

In researching versions of the myth of Perseus and Medusa, the artist interprets it by contemplating the metaphor of the role of art in society. While the direct encounter with the Gorgon transforms the individual into stone, art can be the medium, the mirror or the shield through which we can face complex issues without becoming paralyzed by them.

Compelling the viewer to question their own complicity within our society of excessive consumption and mass-production, Soal’s toothpicks works astound and confound the perception of this humble material. Foregrounding pressing ecological concerns, these works primarily attempt to expose the paradoxical relationship humankind has with nature, that of simultaneous dependence and domination.

Gorgon2022
Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board
119 x 145.5 x 13 cm
Spolia2022
Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board, Glass Fibre Reinforced Concrete with Used Motor Car Oil and Rebar
142 x 146 x 14 cm
Remains to be seen | 2022 | Installation View
Masquerade, 2022
Bamboo and Birch Wood Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board
201 x 283 x 32 cm
Kindling, 2022
Burnt and Unburnt Bamboo Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Ripstop Fabric, stretched on Obeche Wood Stretcher
175 x 153 x 25 cm
La Peau de Chagrin, 2022
Eroded Sandpaper
61 x 53 cm
Variable Edition of 5

Hyde, 2022
Burnt and Unburnt Bamboo Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Ripstop Fabric, stretched on Obeche Wood Stretcher
106 x 100 x 14 cm

PRESS

︎ ARTICLE on Lampoon by Simoné Esterhuizen

MARGINS OF ERROR



THE NIROX FOUNDATION - Sculpture Garden
GROUP EXHIBITION
MAY - DECEMBER 2021
Installation view of Relic (2019 - 2021), included in Margins of Error at The Nirox Sculpture Garden, Johannesburg

Chris Soal’s first outdoor sculptural installation, Relic (2019 - 2021), consists of various sized concrete sections,installed in the landscape in numerous configurations,almost as if presenting these totemic forms in various states of decay. Drawing on his continuous body of work with toothpicks, the artist poured concrete over sculpted toothpick forms, before removing each toothpick, leaving being its haunting impression. The residual forms and textures of the surface are suggestive without being descriptive, drawing comparisons to barren topographies, dead coral, rough tree bark, and eroded marble — their abstraction leaving multiple avenues of interpretation open.

Recognising that many public sculpture needs to contend with the problem of “the monument,” the decision to create columns, large and looming phallic forms, was intentional. It felt like a problem that couldn’t be avoided, and instead an issue that needed to be addressed. The construction of these concrete surfaces through thevoid impressions of toothpicks, a material so insignificant and ubiquitous, felt like a fitting way to undermine the power that structures so erected often attempt tocommunicate. Soal references Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias” (1818):

“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Reminiscent of columns, Relic (2019 - 2021) suggests a link to ancient empires, globally. These totems of “the never ending human struggle to leave an impressionthat lingers longer than our lifespans”, calls the viewer to reflect on their complicity ina disordered hierarchy of values fuelled by consumerism, while prophesying of the potential doom that inevitably awaits a near-decadent society. It is no accident then that Relic is unveiled in what is called the Cradle of Humankind, a site well known forfossil finds.

The decayed, fragmented and ruinous suggestion of the toothpick-less surface of the concrete might remind one of the forms in Max Ernst’s iconic “Europe after the Rain” (1940 - 1942), a direct challenge to the modernist aspirations that architecture’s pride in concrete held. Furthermore, the concrete recalls the proximity of Johannesburg in the Eden-like context of the landscaped park.

One of the paradoxes of ruins is how their collapse opens them up, exposing the interior to the exterior. If a present monument is a future ruin, then Relic poses the question not of what is present, but of what is absent. How then can the evidence of things unseen provoke us as viewers to look beyond ourselves? How could a ruin expose our interior spaces, our hidden motives, so that we may not be left, ruined?


Relic, 2021
Glass Fibre Reinforced Concrete Reliefs
Dimensions Variable
Relic, 2021
Glass Fibre Reinforced Concrete Reliefs
Dimensions Variable
Relic, 2021
Glass Fibre Reinforced Concrete Reliefs
Dimensions Variable

The artist acknowledges the support of the The Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust, whose grant made much of the production behind this work possible.

Acknowledgement also goes to the Soal Studio team: Jonathan Illunga, Israel Sambuka, Dean van Wyk, to VM Engineering, and many others who have been integral to bringing this project into existence.

︎ ARTICLE on Design Indaba
︎ ARTICLE
on Sunday Times by Sanet Oberholzer
︎ ARTICLE
on WANTED by Julia Freemantle
ARTWORK DETAILS

Reverie , 2023
Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board, with Burnt and Unburnt Bamboo and Birch Wood Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board
198 x 118 x 14 cm

  INFORMATION

Exhibited in Finds taken for wonders, 2023, Piero Atchugarry Gallery.


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ARTWORK DETAILS

Gargoyle, 2023
Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board, Glass Fibre Reinforced Concrete with Used Motor Car Oil and Rebar
154 x 127 x 14 cm

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ARTWORK DETAILS

Intimation, 2023
Bamboo and Birch Wood Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board
175 x 132 x 27 cm

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ARTWORK DETAILS

Holding Out, 2023
Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board, Glass Fibre Reinforced Concrete with Used Motor Car Oil and Rebar and Flat Bar
127 x 126 x 12 cm

  INFORMATION

Exhibited in Finds taken for wonders, P
iero Atchugarry Gallery. 


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2022

ARTWORK DETAILS

Nomad, 2022
Bamboo and Birch Wood Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board
310 x 400 x 100 cm

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ARTWORK DETAILS

Kindling, 2022
Burnt and Unburnt Bamboo Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Ripstop Fabric, stretched on Obeche Wood Stretcher
175 x 153 x 25 cm

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ARTWORK DETAILS

Masquerade, 2022
Bamboo and Birch Wood Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board
201 x 283 x 32 cm

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ARTWORK DETAILS

Gorgon, 2022
Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board
119 x 145.5 x 13 cm

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2021

ARTWORK DETAILS

Mother , 2021,
Bamboo and Birch Wood Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Ripstop Fabric and Board, 
270 x 400 x 35 cm

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ARTWORK DETAILS

Spolia , 2021,
Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board,
150 x 73 x 15 cm

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ARTWORK DETAILS

All that we can't leave behind , 2021,
Glass Fibre Reinforced Concrete Relief Cast, Steel,
Installation Dimensions Variable

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ARTWORK DETAILS

As below so above, 2021,
Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board,
240 x 190 x 15 cm
 
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2020

ARTWORK DETAILS

To make my form your own, 2020
Burnt and Unburnt Bamboo and Birch Wood Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Ripstop Fabric and Board
110 x 148 x 10 cm

  INFORMATION

Exhibited in The Norval Sovereign African Art Prize Finalists Exhibition, 2022 at
The Norval Foundation



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ARTWORK DETAILS

Sojourner , 2020,
Burnt and Unburnt Birch Wood Toothpicks, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Ripstop Fabric and Board, stretched on Obeche Wood Stretcher, 
90 x 90 x 14 cm

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ARTWORK DETAILS

Lost in place, 2020,
Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board,
178 x 178 x 6 cm cm

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ARTWORK DETAILS

Lament (We Thought The Good Times Would Never End), 2019
Birch wood toothpicks in polyurethane sealant on board and industrial fabric
170 x 230 x 60 cm

  INFORMATION
Exhibited in Field of Vision, 2019 at WHATIFTHEWORLD.

Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection.

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2019

ARTWORK DETAILS

Nothing So Empty As the Empty Within. Nothing So Full As the Full Within #1, 2019
Discarded beer bottle-caps, woven steel rope, timber board
200 cm diameter

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ARTWORK DETAILS

Fable, 2019
Burnt and unburnt birch wood toothpicks, discarded bottle caps threaded onto woven
steel rope, industrial ripstop fabric, MDF board, polyurethane sealant.
150 x 190 x 25 cm


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ARTWORK DETAILS

Wanderers in the Night, 2019
Burnt and unburnt birch wood toothpicks in polyurethane sealant on ripstop industrial fabric, stretched on a reinforced Obeche wood frame.
50 x 110 x 15 cm


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ARTWORK DETAILS

    Reckoning, 2019
Birch wood toothpicks, polyurethane sealant, timber board, industrial fabric
180 x 150 x 20 cm

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2018

ARTWORK DETAILS

The Search for Meaningfulness in the Search for Meaning, 2018
Concrete, and birch wood toothpicks held withpolyurethane adhesive on ribstop fabric
130 x 70 x 7cm

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ARTWORK DETAILS

In Order to Be..., 2018 
Polyurethane glue drawings with toothpicks on light Yellow Ochre T. Edmonds paper 
62,7 x 87 x 4cm (Framed) 

ARTWORK DETAILS

To know That One Is Dreaming Is to Be No Longer Perfectly Asleep, 2019
Toothpicks, polyurethane adhesive on board with pine frame
190 x 103 cm

  INFORMATION
Exhibited in Orbits of Relating, 2018 at No End Contemporary Art Space.

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ARTWORK DETAILS

You Threw Sand Into The Wind And The Wind Blew It Back, 2018
Toothpicks, burnt toothpicks, adhered with polyurethane sealant in Pine Wood frame
140 x 65 cm

  INFORMATION
Exhibited in Orbits of Relating, 2018 at No End Contemporary Art Space.

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2017

ARTWORK DETAILS

ISeeYouSeeMeSeeYou, 2017
Bent beer bottle caps on foamboard
200 cm (Diameter)

  INFORMATION

Collection of Galila Barzilaï-Hollander, Brussels.

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ARTWORK DETAILS

Bound,  2017
Misprinted Steel sheets - courtesy Coleus Packaging; ratchet.
150 x 60 cm

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ARTWORK DETAILS

Terrikon Fraction, 2017

Industrial debris from the manufacturing of beer bottle tops on painted board.

216 x 84 cm


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ARTWORK DETAILS

The Call of the Sirens , 2017
Industrial debris from the manufacturing of beer bottle tops on painted board.
251,5 x 119,5 cm

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