Dominic Pretorius is a ceramicist who makes poetic sculptures and immersive installations. The son of an Anglican priest, he is interested in matters of life and death – and the thin veil between the physical and divine.
Earlier bodies of work, A Room Full of Urns (2023) and Urn Burial (2024), focused on funerary urns as vessels for personal grief and for cultural history. For the first, the roomful of simple, lidded urns was accompanied by a symphony of people’s reflections on grief – the outcome of three months of interviews on the topic. For Urn Burial, an eponymous 17th century manuscript inspired a collection of other-worldly urns emerging from the ground. From these unlidded urns, sculptured spirits of the dead erupted. Here, Pretorius questioned how unseen stories and histories intervene in the present, how that which is supposedly dead moves.
Recently, his work has focused more on life, or more specifically, the pleasure and pain of passion. Pour (2026) centres on those experiences during which the body turns to liquid and pours out. Blood, sweat, tears – and other bodily fluids. Bowls of red-glazed liquid pour out and up. White droplets glazed with fluid celadon strokes pour down and are suspended on mirror-topped plinths. For Pretorius, these works explore the confluences of desire and loss. Here, he takes heavy, solid material and sublimates it into something weightless, into something that flows and sings.
Dominic Pretorius (b. 1996, Howick, South Africa) lives and works in Cape Town. His first solo exhibition, A Room Full of Urns (2023), premiered at his studio and was later shown at GUS Gallery and Marvol Gallery. His second, Urn Burial, was presented at Vela Projects in 2024.
He has exhibited at FNB Art Joburg (2026), RMB Latitudes Art Fair (2024) and the Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2023). Selected group exhibitions include Persistence of Memory, Spier Wine Farm (2024); Full House, blank projects (2023); Ten of Cups, 66 Plein Street (2023); Slip Stream, Gallery De MoveOn (2022); HELLMOUTH, 51 Buitenkant Street (2022); and Bluet, KSSO (2021).
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