Pierre Vermeulen was born in Stellenbosch in 1992 and lives and works in Cape Town. His practice draws on myth, ritual and meditation, with a process that is itself a kind of ritual: imitation gold and silver leaf, human hair, sweat and casts of ex-voto, left to oxidise into the surface of the work. The paintings sit somewhere between the sacred and the everyday, holding opposites in balance. These portraits were made in his studio over an afternoon.