Bronwyn Katz

Bronwyn Katz was born in 1993 in Kimberley, in the Northern Cape of South Africa, and works between Cape Town and Johannesburg. Her sculptural practice uses found and discarded materials — most characteristically, bedsprings, wire frames, mattress coils, iron ore, stones, and other salvaged domestic and natural objects — to create works that accumulate traces of bodily use and social history. In retrieving these objects from contexts of poverty and informality, Katz produces sculpture that speaks to the material conditions of life in South Africa's townships and to the intimacy of the domestic spaces they once occupied.

Katz's work engages with the concept of land as a living repository of memory and trauma. The bedframes and springs she employs carry histories of sleep, illness, birth, and death. Her installations — often arranged to evoke topographical landscapes, archaeological excavation, or abstract notation — propose alternative systems of memory and knowledge that draw on fragmentary oral traditions and imagined creole languages. Her practice is driven by storytelling and intuition: she works with an abstract formal language that is in active opposition to overt representation, allowing her sculptures to sustain multiple readings.

Katz was included in The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and in Soft Water, Hard Stone, the New Museum Triennial in New York (2021). She has had solo exhibitions at White Cube in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Peres Projects in Berlin, Andrew Kreps in New York, , MASSIMODECARLO in Paris, and Stevenson in Johannesburg. In 2022 she was selected as a protégé for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, working with El Anatsui. She was awarded the First National Bank Art Prize in 2019.