Johnathan Schultz was born in Welkom, South Africa, and now lives and works in England. His practice moves between painting and sculpture, built up through repeated layers of materials including 23-karat gold leaf, precious stones, graphite and industrial elements — applied, and in some works, deliberately broken down again. The layering is not decorative. Schultz has described it as a way of thinking: depth built the way the old masters built it, stroke upon stroke, until a surface stops being flat and starts to hold light differently depending on where you stand.
That same logic runs in reverse through a parallel body of work in which the gold is fragmented, mixed with other metals and pigments, or, in the works on paper, broken down to the point where it dissolves into the fibre beneath it. Schultz refers to this process as “ungilding”: a deliberate unsettling of gold’s conventional status as a fixed, untouchable marker of wealth. In Schultz’s hands, gold becomes unstable and mutable, behaving less like a symbol of permanence and more like the societies and histories it has historically been used to represent.
This dual instinct, to build up and to break down, underlies the artist’s central and most widely recognised body of work, the Fingerprint Series. Taking Nelson Mandela’s fingerprints as recorded on his 1962 arrest warrant, Schultz reconstructs a forensic document of state surveillance as a large-scale, materially dense object. The transformation is direct: an instrument used to identify, contain, and control a body is rebuilt, layer by layer, into a study of what endures beyond that containment. The centrepiece, Out of the Darkness, incorporates over 9,225 diamonds (895 carats) and was recognised by the Gemological Institute of America for technical innovation.
Schultz’s more recent work shifts register. Follow the Flowers and a body of work built around Gem, a recurring figure whose ambiguous, smiling-but-not expression Schultz leaves open to the viewer’s own reading, move from historical subject matter toward the textures of ordinary contemporary life: empty swings, shifting landscapes, and the quiet evidence of things changing or being left behind. Across both registers, the work returns to a consistent set of questions: what gets left as a mark, what gets worn away, and what — in a person, a place, or a material — survives that process.
Schultz has exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Palm Beach, LA Art Week and Miart Gallery London, and his first major South African exhibition, Lasting Impressions: Tracing Identity & Resilience, was held at the District Six Museum, Cape Town, in 2025. His work is held in private collections internationally.
