Nel Gallery opened Funny Weather, a new solo exhibition by South African multidisciplinary artist Cheryl Traub-Adler, on June 27, 2026. The exhibition invites visitors to explore a thoughtful collection of paintings and drawings that reflect the artist's inner experiences, observations of everyday life, and imaginative dreamscapes. Through intuitive mark-making and symbolic imagery, it encourages viewers to reconsider how people understand and respond to an ever-changing world.
What Is Funny Weather About?
At its core, Funny Weather explores drawing as more than a visual practice—it becomes a way of thinking, sensing, and discovering meaning. Cheryl Traub-Adler approaches drawing as a physical process in which gestures, movement, and accumulated fragments create new forms of understanding. Rather than illustrating ideas directly, the works invite viewers to experience emotions and memories that often exist beyond language.
The exhibition highlights themes of body mapping, gesture, and intuitive mark-making, creating a dialogue between individual experience and shared human perception. Moving fluidly between abstraction and figuration, the drawings leave room for personal interpretation instead of offering fixed narratives.
Dreamlike forms, layered symbols, and spontaneous compositions appear throughout the gallery installation, encouraging visitors to embrace uncertainty rather than search for definitive answers. Instead of presenting reality as something stable and rational, the exhibition suggests that intuition, chance, and embodied experience can reveal equally valuable ways of understanding the world.
Many works deliberately preserve traces of the creative process. Visible marks, textured surfaces, and unresolved compositions become essential parts of the artwork instead of imperfections. This openness allows viewers to engage emotionally with the paintings and develop their own interpretations, making each encounter with the exhibition unique.
Meet Cheryl Traub-Adler
Cheryl Traub-Adler is a South African multidisciplinary artist, educator, and creative facilitator whose practice combines drawing, painting, movement, and research. Her work examines the relationship between the body, memory, spirituality, and the natural environment, often exploring subjects that cannot be fully expressed through words alone.
Throughout her career, Traub-Adler has investigated themes including history, identity, migration, aging, and climate change while maintaining a deeply personal artistic language rooted in observation and intuition. She views creativity as a process of connection—between people, nature, and inner experience.
With Funny Weather, the artist offers visitors an opportunity to slow down and engage with subtle gestures, symbols, and emotions that are often overlooked in everyday life. The exhibition demonstrates how contemporary drawing can become both a reflective practice and a powerful way of exploring the complexity of human experience.