MAJA MARX
(b. 1977, South Africa)

Maja Marx is an artist currently living and working in Cape Town, South Africa. Marx is a proponent of contemporary abstract art; approaching painting as an optical activation of surface. Her paintings are essentially hyperactivations of surface.

Marx starts by mapping ‘found’ compositions onto her canvas, and then allows this process of transcription to self-proliferate. Once the optical field of each canvas has become alive, the artist uses the act of painting to literally ‘stare herself’ out onto the canvas. Each layer of paint, each engagement responds to the layers beneath to become rich self-referential fields in which the physical act of looking is foregrounded; surfaces that are read, looked at and stared into all at once.

‘With the traditional approach to compositional painting there is the comfort of having something for your eyes to perch on, and as visual beings, we desire that perch. We take a breather. We sit on it with our eyes, as a bird that would want to sit on something. It’s a moment for rest. And with my work, I never allow that. When I paint, I’m actively looking. ‘
– Maja Marx

Marx is a fellow of the Ampersand Foundation (New York/ Johannesburg) and a participant of MAPS (Master of Art in the Public Sphere); an exchange between the Wits School of the Arts, Johannesburg, South Africa and the Ecole Cantonale d’art du Valais in Sierre, Switzerland. Since receiving her MFA in Fine Art (Cum Laude) from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2008, her works have been included in a range of public and private collections, additionally, in 2022 Marx participated in the Ekard Residency in the Netherlands. She has also
participated recent group exhibition The Pheonix Runway, with WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery in Cape Town (2022), as well as in the South African Pavilion of the Venice Biennale (2013), and the ELIA Exhibition, Cuenca, Spain and Gent, Belgium (2006).