Nel Gallery invites Cape Town audiences to a solo exhibition by the talented South African artist Werner Ungerer this May. Titled I Walk on Gilded Splinters, it brings together deeply sensitive and emotionally resonant works created over a five-year period. The exhibition opens on May 7, 2026, and will remain on view through the end of the month.
Meet Werner Ungerer, an Interdisciplinary African Artist
Werner Ungerer is a Cape Town–based visual artist with a profound appreciation for the handwritten word as an artistic medium. Specializing in calligraphy, he has developed a distinctive practice that balances literary and visual expression. For Ungerer, calligraphy is also a spiritual discipline, requiring focus, patience, and complete presence in the moment.
Much of his work draws on medieval scripts, particularly Gothic textura quadrata, which has become a recognizable element of his signature style. His pieces incorporate pen and ink on fine paper, embroidery, and hand-illuminated textiles, including fabric and damask. This fusion of techniques gives his work a timeless quality—simultaneously archaic and contemporary.
I Walk on Gilded Splinters: An Honest Talk on Grief and Suicide
Ungerer’s latest body of work, I Walk on Gilded Splinters, debuts on May 7 at Nel Gallery in Cape Town. The exhibition features 17 works spanning calligraphy, ink, embroidery, and drawing. Developed between 2021 and 2026, the series is deeply shaped by the loss of the artist’s brother to suicide in August 2023. At its core, the project explores whether art can help individuals endure and process grief.
Through this series, Ungerer addresses suicide with emotional depth and honesty, encouraging open dialogue around a subject that is often silenced. He highlights the absence of meaningful engagement with suicide in visual art discourse and offers his own experience as a starting point for reflection. For the artist, silence itself becomes a form of harm—one that limits understanding and prevents collective healing.
His calligraphic works present intimate reflections on love, grief, and guilt, drawing on diary entries, elegies, and personal confessions. At the same time, Ungerer explores the concept of the shadow self—an unacknowledged inner force that can become destructive if left unexamined. Rather than rejecting it, he invites viewers to confront and contain it with awareness and compassion.