Ronél de Jager was born in Johannesburg, South Africa (1985) where she currently lives and works. An award-winning multidisciplinary artist, De Jager’s work shifts between painting, sculpture and installation. Her work deals with concepts of time, environmental concerns and with personal narratives as microcosms of broader social issues. Through an abiding interest in translating photographic and video imagery into ambiguous, suggestive paint marks, De Jager explores liminal states. Transience is the constant, change is the leitmotif, both conceptually and formally.

Her works demonstrate the continuous transformation to which every form is subjected and reflect on the eternal process of becoming and of passing away. The through-line is that this change, this mutability renders moments, memories and sensations in a permanent state of flux, forever slipping away. The act of painting the ineffable is a process of trying to understand that which resists understanding. It is in this fertile ground that De Jager’s work exists.

De Jager presented her third solo exhibition, STILL HERE at Kalashnikovv Gallery in Braamfontein Johannesburg in June 2022; the show delved deeper into ideas that the artist had been mulling over during Covid-19 and the lockdowns: gender roles, our position as subjects in the digital age, and limits of emotional range in the flattening reality of social media. The work on the show took as its central image the bouquet, enlarged and isolated on each canvas. However, the rendering of these floral arrangements is anything but traditional. As Ashraf Jamal wrote, “De Jager’s blurred, filigreed canvases evoke the ornamental, then erase it [...]To my mind, it suggests an artwork that is more impressionistic than realistic, the art of someone drawn to miasmas – visualised worlds that quake and tremble in the face of certainty.”

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Earlier solo exhibitions include A.M After Midnight (a three-part series); the first, A Prelude with ROOM Gallery in Braamfontein, Johannesburg; the second instalment, An Interlude featured as a special project at Turbine Art Fair, in Newtown, both in 2014; the third, AM After Midnight with Lizamore & Associate Gallery, in Parkwood, Johannesburg in 2015. Her solo exhibition Broeigrond: Fertile Ground for Golden Regrets secured her the KKNK Kanna Award presented at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, in 2017.