About

Maja Marx  (b. 1977 South Africa) 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. She has featured in South African exhibitions, with her most recent solo exhibition, Skin of the Eye (2023), being her sixth to be hosted with WHATIFTHEWORLD; succeeding There There (2020), Chorus (2018), Glare (2016), Block (2013) and Fold (2011).

Maja Marx’s paintings are essentially hyper-activations 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, Marx 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.

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).

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Selected Group Exhibitions

Permanent Collections

Selected Publications