Angela Maritz
“Strong, confident, joyful art to make you feel like that, live like that and love like that!”
Message
South African-born and now based in Tauranga, New Zealand, Angela Maritz is an established contemporary artist whose work blends expressive brushwork with emotional resonance. With roots in South Africa and the United Kingdom, and a practice grounded in her life in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Angela brings a layered cultural perspective to her art. Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, often with touches of mixed media, she creates paintings that explore the depth of human emotion through nature, florals, landscapes, and figures.
For Angela, painting is a language of presence. Each work is a dialogue between joy and uncertainty, strength and tenderness, nostalgia and renewal. Her process is intuitive and emotional, where colour, gesture, and texture carry as much meaning as the subjects themselves. She seeks to capture not just what is seen, but what is felt — weaving inner landscapes into recognisable forms that invite viewers to pause, breathe, and connect with themselves and their surroundings.
Angela’s career has taken her across the world, her work exhibited in London, Singapore, Melbourne, Sydney, and New York. Her paintings are held in private and corporate collections internationally, with many clients returning for bespoke commissions. Highlights include being selected as one of only four artists across New Zealand and Australia for Avis Car Hire’s Art of Discovery campaign, which documented creative journeys across the country. She is currently engaged in a five-year commission for The Peninsula Hotel in Cape Town, creating original artworks for each suite — a project that reflects her ability to create pieces that resonate with place, memory, and atmosphere.
In 2024, Angela was awarded a scholarship to attend a contemporary art development program in Venice, held in association with the Venice Biennale. Her collaborations also extend globally, including a project with a New York designer that brought her artwork onto luxury scarves. Alongside her professional practice, Angela shares her creative journey through speaking engagements, educational workshops, and contributions to charitable causes.
At the heart of her work lies a belief that art gives form to emotions often too deep for words. Whether through the wildness of a landscape, the delicacy of a floral, or the weight of a horizon, Angela’s paintings embody a kind of human essence — not perfection, but presence. Her art transforms walls into sanctuaries, offering viewers a sense of freedom, connection, joy and a coming home to themselves.
Statement
I paint to give form to what words cannot fully express — the layered emotions of presence, freedom, and belonging. My work is rooted in the natural world, often depicting florals, landscapes, and figures, but always guided by intuition and feeling rather than strict representation.
Through colour, texture, and gesture, I explore joy, strength, uncertainty, and nostalgia, weaving these emotions into recognisable scenes that feel both familiar and alive. I am drawn to the tension between control and spontaneity, the seen and the felt, creating work that balances strength with tenderness, stillness with movement.
Each piece is meant to be more than decoration; it is an invitation to pause, breathe, and connect — to experience a moment of presence. I want my paintings to feel like freedom on a wall, like a deep exhale, like coming home to yourself.