Chris Soal (b. 1994) is a South African artist whose critically acclaimed sculptural practice—shaped by a Johannesburg upbringing and now based in Cape Town—has garnered international recognition for its innovative engagement with materiality, perception, and place. Soal’s studio-based practice is sculptural in its output, working with objects and materials in ways that show not only a conceptual engagement with the contexts and histories of the objects but also reinforce the body as a site for knowledge reception and production. His works seek to make a poetic statement through the simplest of means, engaging the viewer’s spatial awareness and perceptual habits while challenging core societal preconceptions of value and hierarchy.

Through his use of discarded and mundane ephemera, such as toothpicks and bottle caps, along with concrete, rebar, electric fencing cable, sandpaper, and other industrial materials, the artist intuitively develops the familiar to the point of the uncanny. Soal’s works can be considered as a social abstraction, deeply rooted in and reflective of his upbringing in Johannesburg, South Africa. Working symbiotically with his materials, Soal utilises the inherent physical characteristics of the objects to transform them through processes of aggregation, combination, and erosion—seeking to foreground pressing ecological concerns by repositioning the viewer as an active agent within the contemporary environment. Despite the artificiality of his materials, his process allows them to take on biomorphic qualities or evoke natural phenomena, expressing his interest in their phenomenological qualities.

In 2017, Soal graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts (Hons) at the University of Witwatersrand. He was awarded the PPC Imaginarium Award in 2018, alongside being named the winner of the Sculpture category. He has been awarded residencies by the RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal (2019); the South African Foundation of Contemporary Art in South Africa (2018) & Brussels (2022), and by the Nirox Foundation, Cradle of Humankind (2021). Soal has held solo exhibitions with MAXXI (2025) in Rome, Italy, WHATIFTHEWORLD (2024/2021), Piero Atchugarry Gallery in Miami (2023), and Eduardo Secci Gallery in Milan (2022). He also held a solo booth at Art Brussels (2022) and The Armory Show (2024) with WHATIFTHEWORLD gallery.

Notably, Soal was selected as one of 10 contemporary artists to participate in the 5th edition of the Dior Lady Art project in 2020/2021. Selected group exhibitions include Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200 (2025) at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and Seven Contours, One Collection (2025), on permanent display at the Museum of African Contemporary Art in Marrakech, Morocco. Significant private and public collections include the Brooklyn Museum (USA), MACAAL Museum (Morocco), LAM Museum (Netherlands), the Bunker Artspace (USA), Galila’s P.O.C. (Belgium), Arsenal Contemporary (Canada), The Braunsfelder Family Collection (Germany), the Mona Museum (Tasmania) and the Cloud 7 collection (Belgium), amongst others.