Pierre Vermeulen was born in 1992 in Stellenbosch, and currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. He obtained a Masters in Visual Arts in 2021 from the University of Stellenbosch.

Vermeulen’s artistic practice explores the unconscious—myth and ritual drawing on ancient philosophical traditions and meditation to engage with spirituality and symbolism. His process involves repetitive rituals that merge meditation, performance, and alchemy, using materials like imitation gold leaf, human hair, sweat, and casts of ex-voto to create both aesthetic and conceptual imprints through oxidation. These works, often incorporating metals like imitation gold leaf and imitation silver leaf, reflect the junction of the sacred and the profane, examining dualities such as light and dark, masculine and feminine, and the internal and external realms. Through his use of ritual and symbolism, Vermeulen invites reflection on the human need for meaning beyond orthodoxy, while reconciling opposing forces like chaos and order, in search of balance.

In 2025, Vermeulen presented "Bidden or Unbidden, Enter the Hot Dream" (2025) at WITW x Krone gallery in Tulbagh, Cape Town, and participated in various presentations with WHATIFTHEWORLD gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; at Artissima, Art Cologne, Art Brussels, Art Abu Dhabi, miart, and with Prometeo Gallery at miart, Milan. In 2024 with Reservoir Projects Vermeulen took part in Fellow Ground group exhibition in Berlin and Chapter 1: "Vernacular Materiality" with Reservoir Projects X PSM Berlin. Vermeulen also took part in the group exhibition: "Of their time" (7), A Look at Private Collections (2023) at the museum Frac Grand Large in Dunkerque, France.

Selected solo exhibitions in Cape Town include "Formats for Transition" (2023) with Reservoir Projects, "Thoughts Think Themselves" (2021), a solo exhibition in culmination of his Master’s presentation, an Artist Room (2020), Of Itself (2018) in Johannesburg, and Pierre Vermeulen (2017). Selected group exhibitions in Cape Town include "Matereality" (2020) at Iziko South African National Gallery, "A Show of Solidarity" (2020) at SMAC Gallery, "Forward! Forward? Forward…" (2019) at the Stellenbosch University Museum in Stellenbosch, "Folly" (2017) at SMITH, In 2018 a solo booth at Artissima in Turin, Italy. Pierre Vermeulen’s work was recently selected for the prestigious Pinakothek der Moderne PIN. Benefit Auction.

I always say that the work is rooted primarily in meditation. In Vipassana, you pay acute attention to the sensations of the body, and practice not indulging in thought, allowing it to pass. We do not think our thoughts. They just appear. What I took away from this deep commitment to meditation was a fascination in why we are so convinced of our thoughts. Over time, I started paying attention to the content of my meditation. The symbolism, archetypes and dreams present, this all became interesting to me.

In the studio, I use my meditation practice to try to leave the external world and enter an internal world, as you would when you sleep. To access the subconscious, where there is more access to meaning and symbolism. The format of my paintings reference double beds, towels, doormats, napkins—these domestic objects all talk to a transition from one state to another.

In Munich, I saw these votive offerings… these hands and arms in silver displayed in the shop window. I found them very potent, ringing like a siren. ‘Okay, go in, take it, buy it.’

I realised these votive offerings speak exactly to what I'm interested in, this internal/external dialogue that humans have. The ones that I got hold of are Catholic votives, but almost all cultures have a form of them. They go back into antiquity. Indians and ancient Greeks used them all the way back to Mesopotamia. They say that the Venus of Willendorf might also be a votive. If there is some ailment or devotion, we create an object, as a way of externalising our internal issues. We really do it with all objects and behaviours. Some are more charged than others. We make meaning through these things. 

I was brought up Christian and but I never related to the way it was taught to me. Later on I became interested in it from a mystical and archetypal point of view, a more practical point of view. I think humans need a form of religion, spirituality is such a trendy term that's used, but in its special way, spirituality is part of us. It's part of our makeup. If we don't have a ritual, we try to create systems whether they are orthodox, sacred or profane. 

Or even conjure up our own moral systems. It becomes very dangerous because then we regard ourselves as the highest beings. However, it's still very tricky, it's an ebb and flow really. I'm interested in this need we have for a religion.

Nietzsche speaks about Dionysus and Apollo, the Dionysian and Apollonian structures of order and chaos. Dionysus was the god of ecstasy and Jesus was the god of ecstasy. Like that beautiful Bernini sculpture, the Ecstasy of St Therese, she radiates in awe. It’s the kind of experience that I think few people actually have nowadays. Where one meets the unconscious and then makes it conscious. That awareness is a religious experience. It's these experiences that prompt humans to invent religions. 

The connection between Jesus and Jim Morrison is via Dionysus for me. I started paying attention to this, and then listening to Jim's music and imagining how he would act on stage. I became enchanted, in a way, with him, like many others. It happened very serendipitous really. His enigma and the way he moved people. He embodied an archetype to audiences. In his time, it was the first time on a global and youth driven scale that artists were in massive performance spaces, with crowds coming together, picking up this big energy and everyone sharing the same experience. People go into a trance seeing this figure on stage dancing and allowing them to feel like they can also go there and embody it. And with Jim dying so young his image froze in time and became an archetype and projection.  

Obviously Jesus and Jim have their differences, but there are embodied archetypal correlations. And I thought this very pure ecstasy compared to this very rock and roll ecstasy was interesting. It's about allowing a certain truth or desire of the unconscious to be seen and experienced. A wildness. Also a lot of these interests tell me about myself, what’s unfolding in my unconscious that makes these interests potent to me, you know. Why does it need to be Jim Morrison and not someone else? It’s more about the image and archetype. 

I really do love performance. With art, I view all my rituals including yoga, meditation and studio work as performative, like embodiment. It is very much like a ritual, something I repeat. I use sweat, I collect it. I used to literally scoop the sweat with a cup off my body in hot yoga. Now I wring it out of my clothes after a session. One can sweat up to a litre per hour! The sweating body is a filter, the body active, and the paintings are part of the product of the body, like the remnants of a performance process, after an intensive activity. It's what stays behind; the sweat.

In the studio, if I'm completely alone, I'm very performative. I go into the idea of a character that is hovering in my mind. It's not a spiritual kind of performance. It's more about the potency of the performance. For a while I listened to a lot of The Doors music on repeat, learning the lyrics, paying attention to how Jim used his voice, and then I'd try to imitate that. A way to become the archetype I suppose. 

I listen to the same song for hours. The more I ingest, the more information goes into my work into the paintings. Well that's with everything that comes into the studio. I want to have it root in the unconscious - make the new information intuitive. Meaning comes from keeping my body busy, not focusing on things looking too good. If you think too much, you second guess and pay too much attention to your thoughts, instead of allowing thoughts just to come.

In university, I covered a book with imitation gold leaf. At the exhibition, people touched and paged through it. Years later, I revisited the work and saw fingerprint marks on it—the imitation gold leaf had oxidised, like reverse alchemy, taking the gold away. The alchemists were a mystical group who were interested in the ancient knowledge of the body and how to turn base metals into pure gold. Jung was interested in how the alchemical process can be likened to individuation. How the soul moves through phases, like a blackening, a whitening and then a reddening - becoming golden and the ideal self. 

Humans have always had this pull towards gold and that I like. It’s religious - from spiritual to monetary systems. The gold, like the sun, is more active in the day, it is inviting, pulling you towards it. The silver, in the new paintings, is more confrontational, like a mirror. It is like the moon. When you are sleeping, it’s a dangerous time, a time of the unknown, a time when the unconscious reflects itself through archetypal symbols.

I spent time on and off between November 2024 and February 2025 at the Krone farm preparing for my solo show, Bidden or Unbidden, Enter the Hot Dream. It was a time of intense concentration and production. In the process of preparing for the show, the gallery space itself became an important creative element. It is symmetrical like the body, The number two is very significant in my studio. You need two things to create another - so it has to do with unity and sacrifice. The building was originally used as a milk stable. A place of extraction - water going through a body and then becoming milk, feeding an infant, “land of milk and honey”. I wanted this body of work to focus on silver leaf - I wanted the paintings to be more related to a ‘searching for meaning via the unconscious prompts of desire through archetypes and symbols’. The previous work was more about meditation and here I thought about the contents of those meditations let’s say.  

The steps outside the gallery building look like a monastery, you have to climb up towards the building. Ancient temples were built atop high places because they're closer to the gods, and it's also a vantage point, a moral high ground. So there's a kind of resistance on the legs when climbing the steps. It’s an awareness of entering a space by climbing. You don't just walk into the building. 

I placed the mirror over the window above the entrance of the building. As the building is quite high up, it doesn't reflect the buildings around it. You can see a cloud moving in the window, you see blue sky, and as you walk down the road towards the building, you see some of the trees, and then the mountain. As you start climbing the steps everything disappears and you only see blue sky. So it's almost like heaven being pulled into the building. The title of the exhibition comes from a quote that Carl Jung had engraved above his front door and was later engraved on his tombstone. It said, “Bidden or Unbidden, God is present”. “Enter the hot dream” comes from a poem by Jim Morrison. Combining them was a way for me to relate to our unconscious desires that need no invitation to manifest themselves and the religious experience of coming to terms with them - it’s like confronting the shadow. 

I was lucky to have experienced the farm in winter and summer having been to the residency twice now. During winter I saw snow in the mountains and lots of rainy clouds, icy winds. The winter light is different to the summer light. I like both. I was greeted by the mountains in the morning, saying goodbye in the evening. I didn't necessarily do something direct in relation to them, but I guess in some way the mountains did find their way in the exhibition. Like a meditation in the morning or the evening, looking at these mountains that almost wrap around you. I grew up in Stellenbosch, which also has these wraparound mountains, like a womb or nest. What the residency offered was complete indulgence in my practice - I could go to sleep with the same thought and drive as the one I woke up with. It’s a continuity that really helps me build a deeper relationship with my practice.