Wessel
van Huyssteen

Wessel van Huyssteen has been active as an artist, community arts educator, lecturer, curator and film maker since 1986 when he graduated in Fine Arts from the UFS.
He has been nominated and won several local and international documentary film awards. He completed his Masters of Art in Fine Arts at Wits University in 2017 and passed with distinction. Since then he has attended several local and international residencies, held three solo exhibitions and participated in several local and international group shows.
Wessel’s works are in the South African National Art Bank collection, Glo’Art International collection in Maastricht, Belgium as well as the Philippe and Kunga de Chandelar Petro Collection in Hungary. He has been selected to exhibit on the South African exhibition NinetyOne Consignment in London curated by Artiq running from 2022-2024.
His interest lies in the landscape and its historical representation. He explores concepts of place and non-place through a variety of media. He, amongst other, produces intimate and highly detailed watercolour paintings as well as abstract fibre art. The textile works consist of densely sewn machine stitching onto layers of Viscose, Rayon and Nylon. The layers are cut and re-sewn to excavate and construct disrupted geographies. The material is key to unpacking the ontology of these painterly like surfaces. His work explores relationships, paradoxes and possibilities between body and ground, culture and nature, extraction and conservation, space versus earth, all set in an age overshadowed by the climate crisis and species extinction.
He is a cat person living off the grid in the hamlet of Rosendal in the Eastern Free State, South Africa.
Selected works

Kankerbos, 2023
Watercolour on paper
300mm x 400mm

Shortcut, 2023
Embroidered Rayon and Viscos
985mm x 1445mm

The hand that guides the needle, 2023
Hand and machine stitched Rayon, Cotton and Viscos
1200mm x 1730mm

Red Hot pokers I, 2023
Watercolour on paper
240mm x 320mm

Scape sans sky, 2023
Rayon, Viscos, Nylon, Cotton
1725mm x 1105mm

Crinum bulbispermum II, 2022
Watercolour on cotton paper
280mm x 380mm