Notes

From the late 1980s to 2003, Karel Nel undertook several voyages into remote parts of Micronesia and Polynesia, spending time with the last of the celestial navigators. He subsequently produced a number of elongated map-like works such as Prelinguistic Landscape, Voyager and Voyage Mind, which considered the human capacity to set course into the unknown, the capability that enabled our species to set out into unfathomable stretches of ocean and which, over eons, led to the population of these extraordinarily remote islands of the Pacific. Nel’s work has, over the years, attempted to map human consciousness focusing on the interface between the seen and unseen worlds.

His major artistic output is drawing. Working with pastel and richly coloured pigment on bonded fibre fabric, and also with a range of other materials such as ochre, volcanic glass, sand and 'dust' from significant places around the world, he has also used rare materials as the basis for works. Tapa cloth, on which the work is executed, was a sacred cloth-like substance in the Pacific, created by beating the bark of the Ficus Ficus trees.

Often created on a large scale, Nel’s art is at times rigorously abstract, while at others, more representational, depicting objects and textiles from his collection, or structures and environments from his extensive travels.

Nel’s work can be found in private and public collections throughout South Africa, including the South African National Gallery, Cape Town, and the Johannesburg, Durban and Pretoria Galleries. In the USA, his work is represented in the National Museum of African Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In the UK, his important work, Potent Fields was acquired by the British Museum and presented in their ground-breaking exhibition, South Africa: the Art of a Nation in 2017.

Provenance

Acquired from the artist by the current owner.