Kylie Wentzel / Latest release
Our latest release comes from the inspired hands of Kylie Wentzel – a fast-emerging artist with four solos to her name since graduating just nine years ago.
We’ve been privileged to work with her since 2020 and to witness the exciting developments within her practice, one of which is a shift in colour treatment, as she moved from largely black-and-white artworks to forays into colour. This evolution of her work is reflected in her artworks for 50ty/50ty, where her first screen print, Birdlife, was purely monotone and her recent piece a complex parade of colour.
Inspired by one of her acrylic paintings, Woman in a Rock Pool plays with a reimagined palette and the layered nature of the screen print process, where every new layer – and colour – introduced creates an exponential number of additional hues, happy accidents and new, unpredictable dynamics.
Woman in a Rock Pool by Kylie Wentzel
Kylie Wentzel (b. 1993) continually explores new mediums as a means of resisting the constrictions of formal art training, with her distinctive, bold, graphic-style acrylic paintings largely informed by her love of linocut – both the medium itself and its idiosyncrasies within the South African art historical context. Her work bears what the artist calls “remnants” of this influence, which she explains are evident in the “distinctive borders and using them to contribute to the narrative, mark-making, combining picture and text, [and] bold graphics”. Her aesthetic is intentionally loose, intuitive and naïve, with a sense of raw immediacy that is also apparent in her subject matter: She is inspired by her surrounding environments – both natural or urban – and the creatures, objects, people, paraphernalia, smells and scribbles that inhabit and adorn these spaces.
Since her graduation in 2015, Wentzel has held four solo shows at Kalashnikovv Gallery, participated in group exhibitions and prominent art fairs across South Africa and in Paris, and won the Emerging Painting Invitational Residency Prize in Angola in 2020.
