Artist Database

Elli Wahl is a Johannesburg-based artist, born and raised in East Germany. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her practice spans painting, drawing, and photography, often moving fluidly between abstraction and representation.

Wahl’s work is deeply informed by both the human figure and the natural world, drawing attention to the overlooked, the fragile, and the quietly resilient. She is particularly interested in moments of transition — where forms emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure.

Her recent exhibitions include a solo presentation at Art IQ and the duo exhibition Metamorphosis at Candice Berman Gallery. She has also participated in group exhibitions at Stokvel Gallery, White River Gallery, and Henry George Gallery and is a member of “The Printing Girls” collective.

Across her practice, Wahl continues to explore themes of transformation, tension, and the spaces between states of being.

“My work begins in the dark — in gesture, abstraction, and the unruly pull of paint. From this space, forms slowly emerge: a figure, a curve, a fragment of something becoming. The process is one of discovery rather than control.

I move between abstraction and representation, allowing each to inform the other. Much of my work is rooted in life drawing — an attempt to hold onto fleeting moments, to respond to a presence that will never exist in the same way again.

Alongside the human form, I am drawn to the quiet intelligence of nature — to organisms and systems that exist beyond our immediate attention. These subjects become metaphors for transformation and resilience.

What connects these elements is an interest in the in-between: spaces where opposites coexist — light and shadow, chaos and order, presence and disappearance.

My process is as much about erasure as it is about mark-making. Forms are uncovered rather than imposed.

I am not searching for answers, but for marks that ask questions — traces of becoming, rather than fixed states of being”. Elli Wahl