About
Nicolaas Maritz (born 9 July 1959) is a South African multi-media artist. His artistic roots are deeply embedded in the Southern African landscape. Drawing inspiration from its shapes and colours, its creatures and its sounds, he has, during his career, created a unique body of work, instantly recognizable by virtue of the idiosyncrasy of his vision and the immediacy of the manner in which it is realized. Curious juxtapositions – of the real and the fantastical, the natural and the artificial, the simple and the complex, the humorous and the sinister – are a defining characteristic of Maritz’s art. Many writers have commented on this aspect of his work, and on the creative friction generated by this interplay of contradictory elements, which extends also to his stylistic usage and artistic aims. In describing his paintings, Hilary Prendini-Toffoli writes, “though deceptively naive, in a retro technique evocative of the ‘30s and ‘40s, these multi-levelled paintings manage at the same time to be both meaningful and decorative.”
Maritz was born into an artistic Pretoria family, his father an architect and his mother a ceramic artist. Early influences which were to inform his work, were derived from his parents, his Namibian grandmother, and two artistic Pretoria aunts. Their architectural designs and drawings, watercolours, graphic work, ceramics and illustrations helped to form his precocious artistic sensibility, long before he reached art school at the University of Cape Town in 1978.
Art books and reproductions featuring the work of the German Expressionists, Fauvists, Matisse, Picasso and the Post-Impressionists played an important part in his formative years. These were supplemented by personal encounters in Pretoria with Walter Battiss’s playful artistic exuberance and enthusiasm for 'primitive' art, and discovering the dark and provincial surrealist approach of Fred Page in Port Elizabeth. The highly stylized and often garishly coloured works of Jacob Hendrik Pierneef and the luminous stained glass windows of Leo Theron, left lasting impressions. Later, momentous encounters in London during the 1980’s with Gilbert & George and their 'living sculpture' art, and a life-long friendship with the South African ceramic artist Hylton Nel, became perpetual sources of inspiration.
Maritz is a prolific artist, but seems to possess an almost boundless ability to reinvent his aesthetic approach. He is particularly known for his paintings of the Southern African landscape, especially for his singular portrayals of Table Mountain, but his extensive oeuvre is by no means limited to this genre. It includes a large body of paintings, as well as drawings and prints, with excursions into graphic design, ceramics, sculpture, digital and other media. In recent years his approach has been to up-cycle some of his past works in ‘traditional‘ media, through digital collage and montage techniques, to create contemporary and cryptic fusion forms, featuring digital drawing and manipulation, layered sound, and video.