Kylie Wentzel

Wentzel is an early-career artist who stretches the language of printmaking beyond its traditional vocabulary. Trained in relief and intaglio printmaking, she has since evolved into a painter. Her style is bold, graphic and improvisational, melding the immediacy of painting with her love of linocut, where clean borders and textured mark-making combine picture and text. She draws inspiration from the built and urban environment of her home province, KwaZulu-Natal, capturing its animal and human inhabitants and subtropical climate. Working in an intentionally naive style, she creates compositions that feel loose, precise and cheerful at once.

Since graduating in 2015, Wentzel has held four solo exhibitions at Kalashnikovv Gallery and participated in group exhibitions and prominent art fairs across South Africa and in Paris. In 2020 she received the Emerging Painting Invitational Residency Prize in Angola. She lives and works in Durban, where her surroundings continue to shape the observations at the heart of her practice.