Copper Strategy (framed)

Nadine Nothnagel

Nadine Nothnagel is a South African artist based in Wellington in the Western Cape, whose practice transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary through an intuitive interplay of colour, form, and material. Working fluidly across ink, gouache, acrylic, oil, and mixed media, her approach is guided by a deep respect for process. She embraces imperfection as a vital aesthetic force, allowing the seasons, the materials at hand, and the rhythm of daily life to influence her evolving visual language.

With formal training in Surface Design and a PGCE in Visual Arts and Design, Nothnagel spent more than a decade teaching art before fully returning to her own creative practice. This background continues to shape her sensibility: a curiosity about materials, a sensitivity to subtle visual cues, and a belief in art as a tool for close looking. While she still teaches from her home studio, her primary focus is the steady refinement and expansion of her artistic voice.

Her ongoing series, The Daily Extra-Ordinary, celebrates the familiar through the lens of colour. Each work begins with a discarded paint swatch card — an industrially produced, pre-labelled fragment of colour that becomes both canvas and conceptual anchor. The chosen hue sets the emotional tone, informs the composition, and often inspires the title itself, positioning colour as the central storyteller. Against this singular field of pigment, Nothnagel isolates everyday objects — an egg, a domino, a chair — removed from their expected context and quietly reimagined.

In this contrast between the mechanical precision of the swatch and the delicately hand-painted object, a conversation unfolds between mass production and the intimacy of the artist’s touch. The result is a body of work imbued with humour, poetry, and a gentle attentiveness. Mundane objects become carriers of metaphor, small mirrors reflecting the subtle shifts and resonances of contemporary life. Through scale, restraint, and clarity of intent, Nothnagel reminds us that art need not be monumental to be meaningful.

With The Daily Extra-Ordinary and her broader practice, she invites viewers to pause, notice, and rediscover the beauty embedded in the everyday — to see that the ordinary is never truly ordinary at all.

Nadine Nothnagel is represented in Cape Town by The Artists Gallery.