There is something quietly radical about Chris Soal’s art. The Johannesburg-born, Cape Town-based sculptor has made a career out of turning the throwaway into the transcendent, transforming toothpicks, beer bottle caps and sandpaper into objects that seem to breathe, shift and pulse with a strange organic life.
This October, that unmistakable alchemy arrives in Rome with Spillovers: Notes on a Phenomenological Ecology, a solo exhibition at the MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts.
Curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and produced by Fondazione D’ARC in collaboration with Piero Atchugarry Gallery and Montoro12 Gallery, the exhibition unfolds within the museum’s Corner MAXXI galleries from October 19 to November 27. It marks Soal’s first major presentation in Italy and offers a deeply immersive experience that pushes the boundaries of material, form and perception.
Soal’s work has long been rooted in the ordinary. Yet in his hands, the familiar becomes strangely otherworldly. His sculptures, composed of thousands of repeated everyday items, move beyond simple transformation. They echo geological formations, cellular networks and living systems, suggesting that even the most inert materials have the potential for evolution. Each toothpick or bottle cap, once a fragment of consumption, becomes a participant in a new ecology of form.
The exhibition’s title, Spillovers, gestures toward this very idea of excess and transformation. It captures the moment when something crosses its boundary, when matter, meaning or energy spills into something new. For Soal, this is not only a physical process but a philosophical one. His sculptures act as miniature ecosystems, mapping the tension between life and decay, creation and consumption. They ask what happens when the artificial starts to mimic the natural, and when our discarded remnants begin to resemble the very organisms we depend on.
What makes Soal’s practice particularly resonant is his ability to connect the aesthetic with the ethical. His “phenomenological ecology,” as the exhibition’s subtitle suggests, is not about sustainability as a buzzword. It is about perception, how we see, touch and understand the materials that populate our daily lives. By elevating waste into art, he offers a subtle but profound critique of the systems that produce it.
Soal’s career has been as quietly consistent as it is impressive. Since winning the PPC Imaginarium Award in 2018, he has exhibited from Johannesburg to New York and Marrakech, with works entering major museum collections including the Brooklyn Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. His inclusion in the Christian Dior Lady Art project in 2020 only cemented his place as one of SA’s most exciting artistic exports.
In Spillovers, Soal continues that trajectory with work that feels both grounded and cosmic. There is something deeply tactile about his surfaces, rough, luminous and layered, yet they also suggest an unseen rhythm, a biological hum. In Rome, surrounded by centuries of marble and monument, his sculptures whisper a different kind of permanence, one made not of stone but of reimagined fragments, reborn through patience and perception.
For Soal, transformation is not an act of destruction but of discovery. In the quiet accumulation of the overlooked, he finds the pulse of the world itself.
Spillovers: Notes on a Phenomenological Ecology runs at MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome, from October 19 to November 27, 2025. Entry is free.
