Alexis Schofield

Alexis Schofield (b. 1982) grew up in Pretoria and currently lives and works in Cape Town. Having studied design at The Open Window in Pretoria, he graduated in 2010 and started painting in 2017. He creates impressionistic compositions based on found photographs, his own personal archive, and, more recently, images generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Utilising charcoal drawings, pouring inks and oil painting on raw canvas, Alexis seeks to create meaning through the layering of materials and textures. Treating every step of the process as its own found image, and then reworking the image in subsequent steps, Schofield enters a dialogue with the canvas, exploring the scaffolding of his image creation techniques. In his latest body of work, Schofield has been working with AI generation programmes, feeding it images of works-in-progress and prompting the programme to generate different images based on his compositions. This conversation between artist and machine—and the uncanny images that it renders—speaks to the sense of alienation and anxiety that pervades Schofield’s entire body of work. Schofield’s figures are characterised by their fluidity and allusiveness. As the artist’s work becomes more enigmatic, they are increasingly fragmented and disjointed. These mysterious protagonists are posed awkwardly in domestic spaces, where familiar objects, like a rug or a window, tether the senses, while sudden distortions of perspective or protrusions of colour throw them off. “I wanted to get this feeling of alienation to come across in my palettes, in my image choice” the artist says, “this feeling of being outside.” With references as far-reaching as Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Doig, and Marlene Dumas, Schofield produces dense, layered paintings that can simultaneously mesmerise and unsettle the viewer. In doing so, he draws our attention to the aesthetic world that floats at the limits of our understanding and in which we are inextricably enmeshed. In February 2026 David Krut and Ame Bell met Jonathan Goschen, Director of Vela Arts Projects at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. The booth showed a small painting of a vase of flowers by Alexis Schofield. Schofields' treatment of the canvas and paint surface, his textural and blended imagery interested David and he decided to invite him to work at the David Krut Workshop. In the weeks that followed the invitation, email exchanges with Goschen and Schofield provided some exciting moments from which the project could grow leading, ultimately, to Schofield coming into the Workshop in August of 2026 to collaborate on a body of monotypes with Roxy Kaczmarek.