Lynette van Tonder is a South African based multi-faceted artist with training in graphic design and fine art. In 2012, van Tonder switched careers from advertising to fine art with her first solo exhibition entitled COVERED.  While producing her own artwork Lynette also acted as co-manager and co-curator in two contemporary art galleries.

Van Tonder received an honors degree in Fine Art, Cum Laude, in 2016, from the University of Johannesburg. During this period she started integrating textiles into her work as an explorative method of mark making. She occupied art studios in August House Studios and in Lillian Road Studios in Johannesburg from 2018–2021 and is currently working from her home studio where continues pushing the boundaries of creative expression.

Lynette has curated and installed over 70 exhibitions on her own or working with galleries, participated in 4 solo exhibitions and over 35 group exhibitions.

Art practice

Lynette van Tonder’s artistic practice interrogates intersections of life’s ordinary journeys, with their inevitable bouts of chaos and calm. Through meditative methodology, she creates unexpected beauty from her observances, capturing their textured essences in mixed media, making visible the invisible. Where these trajectories of divergent orientations intersect, we find her artworks.

Methodology

Lynette is well versed in many formal art practices such as drawing, painting and printmaking. She employs and combines all of these at will. Her work is deeply meditative, almost alive, as it dialogues between artist and medium, viewer and artwork. Some areas embrace a sense of suspension, beckoning the beholder to draw their own conclusions.