​Contemporary South African Art

Article credits to https://sites.google.com/site/nicolaasmaritzgallery/home/biography
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For more than thirty years the South African painter Nicolaas Maritz has committed himself to a life of intense visual artistic practice. Regularly exhibiting in South Africa, and also from time to time abroad, he has managed to develop a rich and distinctive oeuvre, divergent in subject matter as it is varied and experimental in technique. His unique works now feature in almost every major South African corporate, public and private collection.

In 1996 Muffin Stevens wrote in the Pretoria News, “Nicolaas Maritz is essentially landscape painter, but one with a difference. Like so many South African landscape painters, he paints the Namib and Kalahari, and those ubiquitous Cape harbours and mountains. But his versions and visions of his surroundings are personal and particular. Once you have seen one of his works, you will always recognise any other, and you will see the real landscape, in some way, through the artist's eyes. “
“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...” added Hilary Prendini Toffoli in an article in the Property Magazine of March 2008.
“...Maritz resists labels but art critics have done their best to capture his painting style, calling it zippy, post-modern ethno-centric punk, naive, and challenging”, said Kirsty Maclennan of Woman's Value in September 1996.
“There are, seemingly, irreconcilable contradictions in Maritz's art. His work is just as much at home gracing the glossy pages of interior magazines or in national galleries. His subject matter is light, but not glib. You can have his paintings on your walls and they won't put your guests off their dinner,” wrote art reviewer Lucinda Jolly of a Maritz exhibition at the Irma Stern Museum in 2000.
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