About the artist
Thirza Schaap is a Dutch artist (1971). Wandering along the beach, Schaap finds plastic that has washed ashore and once in her atelier trans forms it into beautiful sculptures. By photographing these sculptures, she tries to evoke an emotional response from the public by creating a contradiction. A clash between the initial aesthetic appeal and after a second look: repulsion and the realisation of the tragedy that waste causes.
Thirza Schaap graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 1996. Since then she has been working as a photographer and is now exploring new art forms through her Plastic Ocean project. She has been living and working both in Amsterdam and in Cape Town, South Africa since 2013.
After first posting her Plastic Ocean images on Instagram, she was published by I-D VICE magazine in the summer of 2017, followed by Lidewij Edelkoorts’s Trend Tablet, L’Officiel, Elle, Vogue, Aperture and many others. Her collection was included in the Finders Keepers exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut, a design museum in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
In March 2018 she gave a lecture and workshop to go along with her exhibition at Fabrica Research Center in Venice, Italy. Plastic Ocean‘s first solo exhibition opened in June 2018 in Amsterdam at Christie’s in collaboration with Colette Olof’s “O,Wonder!”.
The first exhibition of her sculptures opened in March 2019 in Maastricht in The Netherlands and later that year in Cape Town in collaboration with Greenpeace Africa.
Thirza Schaap is also a painter. She creates strong figuratively geometric works in which she expresses her ecological grief and questions consumption, idolatry and what it is we value in our lives today. The use of metaphorical symbols and garments of the figures she paints leaves us with a timelessness impression.
Picture: Bruin-Feskens