Chris Soal

Chris Soal (b. 1994) is a South African artist whose critically acclaimed sculptural practice—shaped by a Johannesburg upbringing and now based in Cape Town—has garnered international recognition for its innovative engagement with materiality, perception, and place.

Soal’s studio-based practice is sculptural in its output, working with objects and materials in ways that show not only a conceptual engagement with the contexts and histories of the objects but also reinforce the body as a site for knowledge reception and production. His works seek to make a poetic statement through the simplest of means, engaging the viewer’s spatial awareness and perceptual habits while challenging core societal preconceptions of value and hierarchy.

Through his use of discarded and mundane ephemera, such as toothpicks and bottle caps, along with concrete, rebar, electric fencing cable, sandpaper, and other industrial materials, the artist intuitively develops the familiar to the point of the uncanny. Soal’s works can be considered as a social abstraction, deeply rooted in and reflective of his upbringing in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Working symbiotically with his materials, Soal utilizes the inherent physical characteristics of the objects to transform them through processes of aggregation, combination, and erosion—seeking to foreground pressing ecological concerns by repositioning the viewer as an active agent within the contemporary environment. Despite the artificiality of his materials, his process allows them to take on biomorphic qualities or evoke natural phenomena, expressing his interest in their phenomenological qualities.