Nicky Marais

Namibia

Available works

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Artist Bio

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.

Exhibitions

2022 Muzivi Wenzira, Group Show, London
2021 Art Joburg Open City, Group Show, Guns & Rain, Johannesburg
2021 Summer Nights, Group show, Guns & Rain, Johannesburg
2020 “Connections”, Guns & Rain, Johannesburg
2019 “Earth Wind Fire Water” with Actofel Illovu and Elisia Nghidishange, Omaruru, Namibia
2018 “Booth” National Gallery of Namibia, Namibia
2018 “Look See” Exhibition, Start Gallery, Windhoek, Namibia
2017 Tulipamwe International Artists Workshop Exhibition, Windhoek, Namibia
2017 Solo Show “Presence in Absence”, National Art Gallery of Namibia Windhoek, Namibia
2016 Guns & Rain Stand, Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg, South Africa
2016 “Art of a New Generation” Museum Würth Germany
2016 “Conversations” National Art Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia
2016 Visual Artists Namibia Exhibition, Omaruru Artists’ Trail, Namibia
2015 “Body&Soul” Fine Art Gallery, Swakopmund, Namibia
2015 “B2Gold”, B2Gold, Otiwarongo, Namibia
2015 “Art Inside”, National Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia
2014 Solo Show, “New Work”, Omba Gallery, Windhoek, Namibia
2014 “Art Inside” National Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia
2013 “Synergies: Remixing Locality” with Andries Fourie and Mikko Ijas in Nairobi, Kenya
2014 “Land Matters in Art”, Juried Exhibition, National Art Gallery of Namibia
2014 “Divergent Strategies” Bush Barn Art Centre, Salem, Oregon, USA
2014 “Gender-Based Violence”, National Art Gallery of Namibia
2011 Namibia Celebration, 21 Years of Independence, Berlin, Germany
2010 Solo Show, “Face of Africa” Art Salon Gallery, Gross-Sieghardts, Austria
2010 “Dry Amigos & ICE” with Mikko Ijas and Andries Fourie, Windhoek, Namibia