Chris Soal is a South African artist who was born in 1994 and practicing in Johannesburg, South Africa. Numerous key galleries and museums such as Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami have featured Chris Soal's work in the past. Chris Soal’s works seek to make a poetic statement through the simplest of means, engaging the viewer’s spatial awareness and perception while challenging societal assumptions of value.

Chris Soal's work has been exhibited in famous South Africa gallery Southern Guild. Established in 2008 by Trevyn and Julian McGowan, Southern Guild represents contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora. With a focus on Africa’s rich tradition of utilitarian and ritualistic art, the gallery’s programme furthers the continent’s contribution to global art movements. Southern Guild’s artists explore the preservation of culture, spirituality, identity, ancestral knowledge, and ecology within our current landscape.

Working with everyday objects to create unusual sculptures, Chris Soal explores themes such as space, ecology, and the relationship between individual and collective in works heavily influenced by his experience living and working between Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. Using unconventional found objects, such as toothpicks and bottle caps, in conjunction with concrete and other industrial materials, Chris Soal negotiates structural impacts on urban living and reflects on ecological concerns, while considering the philosophical and psychological notion of the“self.”

Working symbiotically with his materials, Soal utilises the inherent physical characteristics of the objects to transform them through processes of aggregation, combination and erosion to interrogate views of nature and culture as a binary concept–seeking to foreground pressing ecological concerns by repositioning the viewer as an active agent within the contemporary environment. He re-formulates these elements and substances, ultimately reflecting on the modifications he created with a minimalistic language that reveals sensitivity to texture, light, and form.