INSTAR
Goodman Gallery London
November 2025
Walter Oltmann | INSTAR
Walter Oltmann
Head-Image
Goodman Gallery London is pleased to present new sculptures by Johannesburg-based artist Walter Oltmann, whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture. Following his major museum exhibition, Walter Oltmann: Metamorphosis (2024), at The Norval Foundation in Cape Town, INSTAR takes its title from the biological term describing a growth stage in the life of an arthropod; the moment when an insect sheds its exoskeleton to reveal a renewed inner form. Transformation and regeneration pulse through Oltmann's work through armour-like body suits that merge human, insect, and plant life into hybrid forms.
Oltmann employs hand-fabricated processes of weaving and knotting to create intensely detailed sculptural forms.
Walter Oltmann
Aslla, 2025
Anodised aluminium wire, enamel paint
Work: 80 x 80 x 26 cm (31.5 x 31.5 x 10.2 in.)
Unique
He takes beings that exist at the margins of our perception and daily experience - insects and small organisms we might barely notice - and renders them monumental. Each sculpture rises to larger-than-life proportions, magnifying the scale of the tiny creatures that inspire him. This dramatic shift in scale is central to the work's impact, its contrast highlighting the complexity of life systems through scale.
Constructed primarily from anodised aluminium wire, enamel paint, and plastic beads, Oltmann’s creatures are a product of a lengthy and rigorous process. Through repetitive coiling of wire, he builds shell-like structures that openly display the traces of the internal make-up of insects, mimicking the slow natural process of growth and evolution. The result is multilayered and dense sculptures with stiff, bristle-like appendages, intricate ornamentation and a metallic finish that imitates elaborate patterns found in nature.
Walter Oltmann
Orbis, 2025
Anodised aluminium wire, plastic beads, enamel paint
Work: 95 x 47 x 26 cm (37.4 x 18.5 x 10.2 in.)
Unique
INSTAR disrupts clear-cut distinctions between humans, animals, plants and other lifeforms, suggesting a more interconnected and fluid reality where bodies share attributes across divisions. He engages playfully with traits found in insects and plants: flowers that have evolved bright colours to attract pollinators and insects that develop tactics for protection and survival, and channels these strategies in creating sculptures that blend pattern, colour and tactility.
Walter Oltmann
Carabus 1e, 2025
Anodised aluminium wire, metal beads, enamel paint
Work: 76 x 73 x 25 cm (29.9 x 28.7 x 9.8 in.)
Unique
Walter Oltmann (b. 1960, Rustenburg, North-West Province, South Africa) has an extensive record of creative work produced since the early 1980s, including several public commissions. Since the 1980s, he has developed an interest in the relationship between fine art and craft. He employs hand-fabricated processes of making and has researched wire craft traditions in southern Africa. Oltmann makes connections to domestic textile practices and explores such forms of making in evoking fragility and the passage of time. He often combines aspects of decorative ornament with subject matter that seems somewhat contradictory or disturbing in relation to handcrafted embellishment.
Oltmann obtained a BA Fine Arts degree from the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (1981), and an MA Fine Arts degree (1985) and a PhD in Fine Arts degree (2017) from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he worked as a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in Fine Arts. In 2001, Oltmann was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Arts. His solo exhibition, which followed, travelled throughout South Africa. In 2014, the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, hosted his solo show In the Weave, which profiled three decades of the artist’s work. Oltmann received the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust’s Extraordinary Award for Sculpture for 2022, enabling him to produce an extensive body of work, undertaken in the Villa-Legodi workshop at NIROX Sculpture Park, where the works were also publicly shown. A book on his work titled In Time will be published shortly. Collections include: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Norval Foundation, Cape Town and the Seattle Art Museum, Washington.