Elsabé Milandri
Elsabe Milandri (b. 1980) is a Cape Town-based artist who relies on the unpredictable elements of the creative process. Through observational drawing, Milandri explores what is most readily available to her, what she is most familiar with: motherhood, relationality, learning, home rituals, planted environments, weather conditions. Her collaboration with David Krut Arts began in 2024, when she came into the workshop for two brief days of collaboration with Roxy Kaczmarek and Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim.
Elsabé Milandri’s (b. 1980) work spans observational drawing, nebulous colour, and the visual language of epistemology, and searches out the synapses between ideas, figures, and texts. She references her immediate field: motherhood, relationality, learning, home rituals, planted environments, weather conditions. She invites and relies on the unpredictable elements of the creative process, investigating through play, thinking by writing, feeling by the action and physical movement of mark making.
She completed her BA in Fine Art at the University of Pretoria in 2002 and a Masters in Fine Art, New Media at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT, 2006. She held solo exhibitions, Diagram for Change, 2010 at the AVA in Cape Town, Something like Now, at Salon91 2012, [Dezember] at The Literoom in Basel 2012, Sostenuto at Tina Skukan gallery in Pretoria in 2013, and Wind shifts at eight at Smith Studio 2017.
She has taken part in group exhibitions at Everard Read Gallery, Barnard Gallery, Smith Studio and others in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria as well as Basel, Switzerland. Artworks of hers are found in private collections in the USA, UK and throughout Europe. Milandri lives and works in Cape Town with her husband and four children.
In April 2024, while visiting her parents in Pretoria, Milandri came into the gallery at 151 where she met David. He invited her to come and experiment with Monotypes at the workshop. Despite only having two available days, she took him up on the invitation, coming in to collaborate with collaborating printers Roxy Kaczmarek and Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim. She used her short timeframe as productively as possible, exploring different monotype ideas. Her work was included in the 2024 end of year exhibition In Every Moment. She returned to DKW briefly in July 2025 to resolve a few prints from her previous collaboration, this time working with Roxy. Throughout her collaboration, Milandri experimented with oil- and watercolour-based monotypes, creating works inspired by Cy Twombly and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as some more traditional style landscapes and trees.
