Samuel Allerton South African , b. 1976

Born in the Eastern Cape in 1976, Samuel Allerton grew up immersed in nature and creativity. He spent his early years on the banks of the Bonza Bay river before moving to a farm surrounded by open landscapes. Music was central to family life, and Allerton excelled as a cellist from an early age.

While his father and much of his extended family practiced medicine, Allerton’s rebellious creativity led him down a different path. Time spent watching his father perform surgeries sparked a fascination with human anatomy; a knowledge that would later inform the raw physicality and emotional depth of his sculptural forms.

After completing his A-levels at Ampleforth College in England and attending the Slade School of Fine Art’s summer program in London, Allerton returned to South Africa to study at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, where he graduated with distinction in Sculpture. There, he discovered a lasting passion for the elemental processes of bronze casting, carving wood, and shaping stone.

His practice moves fluidly between minimal, contemplative works influenced by masters like Rothko, Brancusi, Moore, and Gormley, and bold, expressive forms that confront social injustice, ecological neglect, and humanity’s fragility. In his words, his art combines “quirk, primitive and contemporary symbolism, deliberate sentimentality and emotion to throw the personal touch on the universal.”

Major series such as the Soul Series, inspired by endangered gorillas in Congo’s Virunga National Park, and the Warrior Series, casting his own children as protectors of the natural world, embody his lifelong meditation on courage, responsibility, and survival.

Today, Allerton’s sculptures are exhibited internationally and held in private and public collections worldwide. His works resonate not only for their striking presence but for their sincerity, at once playful, contemplative, and profoundly human.