Karel Nel was born in 1955, in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. He studied Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, St Martin’s School of Art, London and the University of California, Berkeley (Fulbright Placement 1988-89). He now lives and works in Johannesburg and until 2017, was Associate Professor at the School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand. In 2018 he took up the post of Senior Adjunct Curator at the newly opened Norval Foundation in Cape Town. Here he curated three major retrospective exhibitions of the work of Sydney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae and Eduardo Villa, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, produced by Elizabeth Borroughs and Nel himself, with other contributions.