Bastiaan van Stenis is a South African artist whose practice centres on painting, alongside sculpture and assemblage. His composite works incorporate found materials, natural detritus, and taxidermy from animals found deceased. Largely self-taught, Van Stenis has developed his practice through sustained experimentation, research, and direct engagement with materials.

Van Stenis’s practice moves between proximity and distance, working both within, alongside, and against established artistic traditions. An attentiveness to ecological systems — including processes of growth, decay, and transformation — informs his approach, with particular interest in thresholds between living and non-living states.

These concerns surface in works that move fluidly between figuration and abstraction. Landscapes, forms, and figures appear, dissolve, or remain unresolved, without settling into fixed narratives. Van Stenis works intuitively, allowing multiple temporalities, moods, and references to coexist. His practice draws loosely from surrealism, expressionism, and neo-romanticism, while engaging with para-pastoralism as a way of holding tension between memory, projection, presence, and erosion, without insisting on a singular reading.

In 2025, Van Stenis presented his first solo exhibition with SMAC Gallery in an Artist Room presentation titled Untimeous. Recent solo exhibitions include Bless Bridges at Kalashnikov Gallery, Johannesburg (2024); Fields and Feelds and Fields of Faddism at Rust en Vrede Gallery, Cape Town (2023); Wake You Gently Singing at World Art Gallery, Cape Town (2019); Night Time Is the Right Time (Kunskantoor Gallery) at Rust en Vrede Gallery, Cape Town, and The Last Time at Nuweland Gallery, Buren, The Netherlands (both 2018).

In 2026, Van Stenis will present new work in a group exhibition with SMAC Gallery at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair.