Linde Kriel (he/him)

Conceptual artist, researcher and curator working with paper, print, water and ritual.

Linde Kriel (b. 2000, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa) is a South African conceptual artist, curator and researcher whose practice moves across papermaking, printmaking, sculpture, installation, photography, painting, cyanotype, drawing and digital media. His work engages identity, grief, belonging, desire, ritual and queer experience within South African and Christian social contexts, often turning to material processes as a way of thinking through what it means to be shaped, marked, dissolved and remade.

Water-based papermaking sits at the centre of Kriel's practice. He was trained in hand papermaking by a master papermaker from Poland and has made paper from kozo as well as from locally sourced materials such as cow dung, banana fibre and used teabags. For Kriel, papermaking is not only a technique but a ritual: fibre is broken down in water and reformed into something new, a process he reads alongside baptism, memory and the remaking of the self. His installation Selfbound comprises more than 11,000 sheets of handmade paper made from his own disintegrated undergraduate artworks, while Words that Refuse to Dry uses photography and digital collage to hold paper in its unstable, wet state. Printmaking has become a second core medium, with its logic of pressure and impression read as a metaphor for the social pressures placed on queer bodies.

Kriel holds a BA in Fine Arts with distinction from the University of the Free State, having also studied theology for a year at Stellenbosch University, a background that continues to inform his engagement with religious ritual and symbolism. He is a Master of Visual Arts candidate at the University of Johannesburg's Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, under the supervision of Prof Brenda Schmahmann, SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture. His practice-led research draws on phenomenology, new materialism and queer theory, and he has presented his work at academic conferences including the Artivism Conference at Tshwane University of Technology and the Bearing Witness Conference at Stellenbosch University.

Kriel has participated in 19 exhibitions, showing at venues including the Pretoria Art Museum, Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Turbine Art Fair and Google Offices Johannesburg. He received a Merit Award at the Sasol New Signatures competition in 2022, the first competition he ever entered, and has been a Sasol New Signatures finalist in 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2026. At the Phatsoane Henney New Breed competition he was a finalist in 2022 and 2023, winning both the Runner-Up Award and the Digital Category in 2023. He is also a recipient of the Dot Vermeulen Prize.

Alongside his own practice, Kriel works as a curator and as an advocate for emerging artists. He is the co-founder, owner and curator of Makwande Art Prints, a youth-led, student-owned enterprise that helps fine arts students exhibit and sell hand-printed works while learning the professional skills of pricing, contracts, presentation and marketing. Through Makwande he curated Makwande l'Abondance at the Alliance Française, Pretoria, in 2026, bringing together 94 prints by 42 artists. He was also head curator of Embodied Reflections (2024) at The Living Gallery @ Lake Umuzi, Secunda, and designed the catalogue for the international exhibition UPROOTED | REROOTED.

His upcoming solo exhibition, Ag My, opens at the Alliance Française, Pretoria, in May 2027.