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“I think that I had dreams of wanting to be… anything! I wanted to represent something in my life. I didn’t want so many things, but I wanted to be able to say, this is what I did, this is mine.”
Wonder’s life and work are inseparable. From growing up in the townships outside Cape Town to living for years alone on Table Mountain, and later exhibiting across Europe and South Africa, his journey has shaped the depth and structure of his painting.
Painting is his primary language. He works intuitively, often building new images over older surfaces. “I don’t give up on an image,” he says. “I start something else on top of it.” Each canvas becomes a layered accumulation — trusting that the work itself will have “a bit of a say in it.”
He works in series that reflect shifts in his life: The Fields of Play during his years on the mountain, Windows at Greatmore Studios, and Inside Out during his time in Germany. His paintings carry this sense of lived time — grounded and quietly assertive.
Wonder began his career in the mid-1990s and was artist-in-residence at Greatmore Studios from 1999 to 2007. He has held solo exhibitions at the Association for Visual Arts and Kunstverein Schallstadt in Germany, and his work is held in collections including the Bodenseekreis Museum, the Erma Stern Museum, Spier Contemporary and Nando’s UK.
“In The Curve”, a bending road draws the eye into the distance before beginning to blur and break down. Wonder painted this landscape from memory after travelling through the Karoo and Eastern Cape, working not from a photograph or drawing, but from what remained afterwards. The curve gives the painting a clear sense of movement, while the surrounding haze makes the scene feel less like a fixed place than something being recalled—its beauty carrying a subtle undercurrent of uncertainty and exposure.
Quiet and delicately restrained, Hindsight barely announces itself as a landscape. Its softened colours and diffused edges bring it close to a colour-field painting, as though the view has been filtered through time and memory. Rather than returning to a specific image, Wonder has painted what remained after an extended journey through the Karoo and Eastern Cape: an atmosphere held at a distance, poised somewhere between beauty, vulnerability and recollection.
In The Family, Wonder builds an image from atmosphere rather than outline. Soft vertical forms gather against a muted field, suggesting presence without fully resolving into fixed figures or structures.
The painting sits between observation and memory. Its restraint gives the image room to unfold slowly: colour, surface, and form seem to emerge through time, rather than announce themselves at once.
This sense of accumulation connects closely to Wonder’s process. He often works over older surfaces, allowing each painting to carry traces of what came before. Here, that layered approach gives The Family its quiet emotional weight.