Elsa Maritz

Elsa Maritz

Elsa Maritz is an interdisciplinary artist who explores themes of transience, grief, and vulnerability. Her practice involves sensory interactions with nature and meditative experiences using multimedia, allowing her art to serve as a means of grounding, flowing, and releasing.

Born in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, Elsa embarked on a five-year journey as a performing artist before enrolling at the University of Stellenbosch, where she completed her BA in Visual Arts in 2011. Her studies focused on relational aesthetics, social sculptures, and performance art, during which she engaged with the complexities of the South African societal landscape. Notably, she participated in a performance piece at the Spier Contemporary in 2010, collaborating with Phillipe Kayumba. 

Over the next decade, Elsa expanded her artistic repertoire to include photography and videography in a commercial context, while also exploring digital art, mixed media, drawing, painting, and performance.

In 2023, Elsa was selected as a finalist in the Sasol New Signatures competition, took place in group exhibitions at  GUS Gallery in Stellenbosch, Tina Skukan in Pretoria and Ark Contemporary in Rosendal. Her work was also published in Klyntjie magazine. Her ongoing practice continues to reflect a deep engagement with her environment and the emotional landscapes of human experience.

https://www.elsamaritz.com

Selected works


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Limb Limbic, December 2022
Photograph | Performance
In Limb Limbic, the artist places herself in the roots of the tree, extending the limbs of the tree with her own limbs, as an attempt to regulate and access her conscious and unconscious emotional states.

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Roots. July 2024
Photograph | Performance

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Vive Memoir Leti, August 2023 
Photograph | Performance
To live in remembrance of death. 

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Clay, January 2023 
Photograph | Performance,

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Tomb | Womb, December 2022 – June 2023
Photograph | Multi Media
A landscape portrait, digitally modified with journal entries.

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Circle, 2022
Performance Art | Photograph
Circle was captured on location in Iceland as an intuitive response to the environment. 

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