About The Artist

Salomi Prinsloo biography

Being raised on a farm, Daeraad in the Vrede district in the Orange Free State had a profound influence and impact on Salomi's life resulting in rustic or earth-bound realities that continues to echo in her art works.

Her earliest memories include a fascination with floral shapes and colours. Objects from the natural surroundings captured and demanded her attention.  She learned to find joy in the interaction with her natural surroundings and transformed them into magical moments by flights of her imagination. Under the umbrella of her mother Rachel's creative spirit, the artist in her could flourished in her natural surroundings.  

After completing her BA Fine Arts degree at the University of Pretoria, she worked as an artist and art educator for most of her life in the city. Surrounded by the urban jungle her work keeps reflecting images from her early childhood. In 2005 she returned to Daeraad, the farm where she grew up, to glean inspiration for her 2006 exhibition at Tina Skukan Gallery titled: ‘The land explored through peeling and revealing’. Her work is not so much concerned with the features of the landscape, but rather with the state of its being and is usually characterised by a pulsating rhythm rushing beneath the surface of her works.  

In 2008 she found a much-loved place in Stilbaai in the Western Cape.  This became her regular hideaway, a place of rejuvenation and replenishment. The well-known bright ochre-orange and purple energetic brushstrokes, and large dominant masculine 'earthbound' shapes were gradually replaced by a rainbow of colours applied with lighter and smaller feathery strokes as more floral and feminine shapes found their way into her work. The place Salomi called her playground within the boundaries of Daeraad got a sister playground: the outstretched white beach, cool waters and dunes of Stilbaai. A collaboration of the influence and impact of these two places became evident in her work.  

Nuances of ethereal nature became more prominent as she concerns herself with issues of human responsibility evident in works of the exhibition: “Exploring realities of co-existence”. She strives to awaken a social consciousness with works like ‘Buthered Rainbow’ exhibited at the Florence Biennale.  Her travels and exhibitions in Londen, Italy and New Zealand have broadened her horizons and left a trail of rich influences, most prominent being romantic atmospheric landscape paintings from Joseph Mallord Turner.  

Salomi's earlier works have been characterized by the richness of colourful textures, shapes and multiple layers of her background onto which objects were often placed without a middle ground, validating the existence of the background. In her later works, the artistic play of backgrounds found a strong visual voice of their own and become abstract artworks in their own right. Her realistic and impressionistic aloes and floral studies are now transformed into softer shapes as they lose their sure forms due to looser lines and brushstrokes which gradually gained ground, until only the “cloud centre” remains; resembling just the essence and fragrances of the floral world visually. Her intention of presenting flowers and natural objects fairly realistically, disappeared in a haze of colour only to awaken soft ice cream landscapes in the viewers’ minds. The “floral-clouds” now have a welcoming playful presence which do not resemble her earlier natural objects anymore, but in their own right, the floral mistiness demand respect with their “lipstick-abstraction-style”

Born in Standerton, grew up in the Free State

Fine Arts training at the University of Pretoria

HED training at the University of Pretoria

Teaching Experience