Provenance

Figures cling to a sheer rock face, minuscule against the vast, fractured terrain that surrounds them. Hang in There confronts the viewer with an immediate tension: the raw physicality of the climb set against the monumental abstraction of the surface itself, all rendered in Werner Bronkhorst’s signature layered technique using acrylic and acrylic gel on canvas. The result is a topography that feels as much geological as painterly. Wide ridges, deep fissures, and a cracked, relief-like ground that demands to be experienced up close, where the boundary between landscape and material dissolves entirely.

As part of the world of Bronkhorst’s ‘CRACK’ collection, a series that strips away the leisure of surf and snow and confronts something rawer: effort, precarity, and the will to hold on. 

His tiny hyperrealist figures — rendered with fine-detail brushwork at a scale that makes them almost invisible until they are not — embody his core philosophical inquiry. 

‘If we look at the world from above, all of us are miniatures,’ Bronkhorst has said, and here that truth feels visceral. The climber is not triumphant; they are simply persisting, a human gesture of endurance played out against an indifferent, abstract expanse. The work asks what it means to cling to something — a surface, a moment, a sense of agency — when the scale of existence dwarfs every effort.

Original artwork by Werner Bronkhorst is available through Dellasposa Gallery, London. Enquire for more details.