“The delight in discovery is something that has pushed my work forward ever since I have started. It is through this moment of awe that the viewer is invited into a space of agency - for now the parameters of a prior way of seeing have been dismantled, and there lies an invitation to reassess what has been relegated to the peripheral.”

- Chris Soal, Finds Taken For Wonder.

Piero Atchugarry Gallery is pleased to announce Finds Taken For Wonders, the debut solo-exhibition in our Miami Survey of newly represented South African artist Chris Soal. Finds Taken For Wonders brings together key concerns in the artist’s sculptural practice, inviting viewers to reconsider their perceptual biases while challenging societal assumptions of value. Soal’s works poetically contain a deep longing to expose the destructive relationship between humankind and nature by engaging the viewer’s spatial awareness of their own body in relation to the monumental organic forms that shape these large-scale sculptures.

Through his use of discarded and mundane ephemera, Soal’s work intuitively develops the familiar to the point of the uncanny. Using conventional mass-produced objects such as beer bottle tops and bamboo toothpicks, Soal highlights the stories embedded into these found materials by extracting them from their typical context. Beer bottle tops become writhing, twisting forms, which appear almost intestinal, but in reality serve as a reminder of the excesses available to us in our modern day. These elements of marginal discard become signifiers of the socio-political and economic excrescences of our society. And yet despite all they evoke, we cannot look away from the spiraling serpentine forms, we are spellbound and challenged through wonder, prompting the question: How do we see the world anew again?

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Exhibition Portfolio