Alexia Vogel

Alexia Vogel is a South African artist whose practice spans painting, printmaking, and artist books, characterized by an intuitive, deeply sensory exploration of color, gesture, and atmosphere. Born in 1991, she graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2013, where she was awarded the Simon Gerson Prize, and has since developed a body of work that moves fluidly between abstraction and figuration, creating dreamlike environments that blend memory and imagination.

Vogel's lush landscape paintings and works on paper conjure fantastical spaces in which the viewer's imagination can roam freely. Her process-driven practice thrives on the exploration of paint and color, relying on instinctual and spontaneous mark-making as well as the organic fall and drip of paint on the work surface. The resulting compositions hover between recognizable natural forms and pure abstraction, suggesting tropical foliage, atmospheric light, and oceanic depths without resolving into literal description.

Her engagement with Japanese printmaking began through the MI-LAB (Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory) artist-in-residence program at Lake Kawaguchiko, Japan, at the foot of Mount Fuji, where she studied mokuhanga, the traditional water-based woodblock printing technique. She was scheduled for a return residency at MI-LAB in 2020, which was deferred to subsequent years. This immersion in mokuhanga added a new dimension to her practice, connecting her intuitive approach to color and mark-making with the discipline and materiality of Japanese woodblock printing.

Vogel has also undertaken a residency with the Southern African Foundation for Contemporary Art (SAFFCA) in Saint-Emilion, France in 2018, where she spent two and a half months painting in the historic wine village. She has presented solo exhibitions in Cape Town and Sydney, Australia, including a 2016 solo presentation 'Yonder' with M Contemporary in Sydney, and has participated in major international art fair presentations in London, Paris, and Johannesburg.

Notably, Vogel created a limited edition artist book titled 'Along the Way,' which is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Pratt Institute in New York. Currently based in Berlin, she continues to work across painting and printmaking, bringing together her South African roots, European base, and Japanese-influenced print practice.