Namibia
Nicky Marais (b. 1962) is a Namibian artist and educator currently based in the former mining town of Oranjemund in southern Namibia. Having worked for eleven years as the Head of Department of Visual Arts at the College of the Arts in Windhoek, she has been an integral contributor to the development of the Namibian contemporary art scene. Now retired, Marais focuses on her own painting practice, an obsessive and graphically sensitive investigation of what she calls “significant shapes”.
Her paring down of objects to simple visual forms unpicks their functional overdetermination and reinstates them as aesthetic objects. Turnstiles, gravestones, tunnels, doorways and temples have been sources of inspiration for her, and their frequent repetition calls on us to find the simplest connections between them. At a foundational level, Marais is interested in these shapes as thresholds and liminal spaces, whether between one place and another or between everyday life and the spiritual realm. She engages with geometric abstraction, locating it in the everyday and suggesting that practices of looking and making are always entangled with the materiality of the world.
Marais has had solo exhibitions at the National Art Gallery of Namibia and at Guns & Rain in Johannesburg, and has exhibited in group shows in Namibia, South Africa, Germany, the United Kingdom and Austria. Though she has shown her work extensively in Namibia, she remains largely under-recognised outside of her home country.
A Kind of Music
2021 Acrylic and ink on canvas 102 x 127 cm
Tied to the Line
2021 Acrylic and ink on canvas 76 x 91 cm
Storied
2021 Acrylic on Canvas 158,5 x 160 cm
All Good Dreamers
2021 Acrylic on Canvas 160 x 160 cm
Still Graves
2020 Acrylic ink on paper 59.4 x 42cm
Inbetween
2020 Acrylic and acrylic ink on paper 29,5 x 29,5cm
Connecting I
2020 Acrylic and Ink on paper 29,5 x 29,5cm
Connections V
2020 Acrylic and acrylic ink on paper 59,4 x 42cm
Connections I
2020 Acrylic and acrylic ink on paper 59,4 x 42 cm
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