“My work begins in the dark – in gesture, in abstraction, in the unruly pull of paint. From this space of seeming chaos, forms are slowly drawn into being.”
Elli Wahl is a Johannesburg-based artist born and raised in (East) Germany. She studied Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand and has only recently reignited her artistic passion and translated that into a body of work consisting of paintings and photographs.
Over the last few years, Wahl’s body of work has ranged from abstraction with a focus on nature, to representational works, and lately a combination of both these approaches. The artist has always been fascinated with nature and the human form as a source of inspiration. There is a pull towards the macabre, the unassuming, the things people rush past and don’t notice: the light that casts an interesting shadow or the beauty of tiny lichen discovered on her adventures.
An overarching theme found in all of Wahl’s works is a sense of a constant emerging, becoming, transformation, and liminal spaces, the ones that are both being and becoming at once. In those spaces it is an interplay between seeming opposites: light and shadow, chaos and order, abstraction and representation. Life is complex; Wahl’s work captures the tension of this duality, saying: “It’s both... but also more than that”.
“I often return to the human figure, especially through the practice of life drawing – a moment that will never happen again, a living presence held in time. There's a quiet urgency to it: a set duration, a body at rest or in motion, and the attempt to capture something honest before it disappears. In these sessions, I'm not only drawing a figure – I'm responding to a moment. I'm trying to grasp a fleeting glimpse of time. At the same time, I'm drawn to the quiet resilience of nature, and always have been.
“Marks are not placed so much as uncovered – emerging through erasure, absorption, and control. The process becomes a conversation between letting go and holding on, between becoming and being. What ties the work together is not a single subject, but a way of seeing: reverent, searching, alive in the spaces that are "not yet" and that are not answers but question marks. I keep searching for marks that ask questions.”