ARTIST RESUME
Thirza Schaap graduated from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague in 1996. Since then, she has been working as an artist and is currently exploring new art forms through her Plastic Ocean project. She has been living and working in both Amsterdam and Cape Town, South Africa, since 2013.
After first posting her Plastic Ocean images on Instagram, she was featured by i-D Vice in the summer of 2017, followed by Lidewij Edelkoort’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 May 2019, during Design Week in Salone, Italy, she was acknowledged by Instagram as one of four artists successfully presenting themselves through social media. In March 2018, she gave a lecture and workshop alongside her exhibition at the Fabrica Research Center in Venice, Italy.
Her first solo exhibition of Plastic Ocean opened in June 2018 at Christie’s in Amsterdam, in collaboration with Colette Olof’s OWonder. Her sculptures were first exhibited in 2019 in Maastricht, the Netherlands, and later that year in Cape Town, in collaboration with Greenpeace Africa.
In 2021, she published her first book, Plastic Ocean, and joined Bildhalle Gallery in Zürich and Amsterdam. That spring, she had her first solo exhibition at Bildhalle Amsterdam and received an Inspiration Award from Hedy D’Ancona and the Humanistic Association in the Netherlands.
She was featured in 2021 by Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Harpers (New York), Sunday Times (South Africa), The Guardian (UK), and all major Dutch newspapers. In 2022, she was a special guest at the Royal Academy London Summer Show.
In September 2023, her solo exhibition Cast Away opened at Bildhalle Amsterdam, where she presented photographs as well as, for the first time in Amsterdam, her sculptures and paintings.
