Catalogue from the 2007 exhibition held at the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg. Softcover, numerous colour images, 44 pages. In excellent, as new condition.
Karel Nel studied Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, St Martin's School of Art, London and the University of California, Berkeley (Fulbright Placement 1988-89). He now lives and works in Johannesburg and until 2017, was Associate Professor at the School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand.
In 2018 he took up the post of Senior Advising Curator at the newly opened Norval Foundation in Cape Town. Here has has curated a programme of major retrospective exhibitions, launching with Re/discovery and Memory: Sydney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae, Serge Alain Nigegeka and Eduardo Villa (2018). Accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, the undertaking set the tone for other exhibitions which have followed; On the Mines: David Goldblatt, (2019), Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture. William Kentridge (2020), Alt and Omega: Jackson Hlungwani (2020 - 2022), The Zanzibari Years: Irma Stern (2021 - 2022).
Since his appointment in 2004, Karel Nel has been the resident artist working with a team of the worlds foremost astronomers on COSMOS, one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken to map a two degree field of the universe. Much of Nels subsequent work has been informed by the ideas, insights, images and raw data issuing from radio, x-ray, infrared and optical telescopes used by the scientists in their research.
Nel joins the COSMOS team on their annual conference in different cities around the world, as they exchange their latest findings. In 2017 at the University of Tokyo, Nel delivered to the team a presentation entitled The Structure of Darkness which engaged ideas related to dark matter, dark energy and other powerful informing agents that shape our universe and which are also reflected in his art. In 2018, at the Copenhagen conference, the focus in Nels related paper was the visual and scientific conventions of representing the notion of vanishing points and their impact on what becomes the centre of attention while other objects remain on the periphery or go unobserved. This aspect of the investigation is broadly underpinned his drawings from 2008 onwards.
In 2012 Nel was an advisor, contributor and participant of the major exhibition African Cosmos, Stellar Arts: African Cultural Astronomy form Antiquity to the Present conceived and curated by Christine Mullen Kreamer at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. Major sponsorship for this exhibition came from the Government of the Republic of South Africa and South Africas Department of Science and Technology.
