Olwethu De Vos (b. 1992, South Africa) is a Johannesburg-based multidisciplinary visual artist and curator whose practice interrogates the human form as a site of intimacy, restoration, and collective care. Working across charcoal, pastel, and industrial materials — copper wire, steel wool, staples, and blowtorch — she builds richly textured surfaces that fuse figuration with abstraction, using labour-intensive processes of stitching and burning to explore healing, lineage, and bodily autonomy.

Trained in glassblowing, sculpture, and figure drawing at the Tshwane University of Technology, De Vos has developed a visual language rooted in South African narratives of memory, ancestry, and repair. Recent solo presentations include Matured (2025) and When There Are No Words (Mmarthouse, 2021), alongside a 2023 residency at the Schütz Fine Art Museum in Engelhartstetten, Austria, where she has continued to exhibit through Austria Art Fair (2023, 2024) and African Contemporary Art (Schütz Art Museum, 2023).

She was a top-15 finalist for the Thami Mnyele National Fine Arts Awards and has shown at Miami Prizm Art Fair (2021) and the Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2021, 2025). In 2026, her work featured in From the Margins to the Centre at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and she was invited to participate in Africa Basel Conversations in Basel, Switzerland.

Alongside her studio practice, De Vos has curated over 15 exhibitions at institutions including the Pretoria Art Museum, August House, the Goethe-Institute, and Everard Read Gallery, and was awarded the Teresa Lizamore Curatorial Residency in 2017. As Co-Founder and Art Director of the BNAP Foundation, she leads the curatorial department and directs major institutional projects across South Africa, including the Foundation’s landmark 10th Anniversary awards in Johannesburg. A committed mentor to emerging South African talent, she runs workshops on the business of art and portfolio development, fostering a sustainable ecosystem for contemporary art while preserving South African heritage.