SUE CONRADIE

SUE CONRADIE is a self-taught South African painter and published poet based in Fisherhaven, near Hermanus. Born in Johannesburg, she lived in the Karoo and later in Kommetjie for fifteen years before settling on the Overberg coast. She began painting professionally in 2010, bringing to her practice a background that spans clothing design, creative writing, music production and metaphysics — disciplines that continue to inform the intellectual and sensory depth of her work.

Expressionist at heart, Conradie works primarily in oils, using imagined landscapes to give her paintings time and place. Her process is one of uncovering rather than constructing — she layers glazes and then removes them, revealing light from within the paint rather than applying it. The result is work characterised by atmospheric depth, restrained mark-making and a palpable sense of inner weather. Colour, influenced by an affinity for Japanese aesthetics and the African bush, forms the foundation of her visual language, while the gestural expressionists and the Old Masters, from the Renaissance painters to the Impressionists, provide her technical grounding.

Her work spans landscape, figurative painting and conceptual installation. Her most recent body of work, ‘Wild’, is rooted in a conviction that within each of us lies an ancient memory of what it means to exist as a natural, organic human being — instinctive, sensory and self-healing. The paintings draw on the untamed intelligence of the natural world as a mirror for this inner life, moving between light and dark, stillness and urgency.

Conradie is a founding member of the Kommetjie Open Studios (est. 2019) and a member of The Kommetjie Collective. Her work is held in the Spier Arts Trust Collection and in numerous private collections. She was a semi-finalist in the 2014 SPI National Portrait Award and has exhibited widely across South Africa. In 2025 she was selected as a winner of the WORLDART10 competition.