ALEXANDRA BRITZ

(b. 1990, Grahamstown, South Africa)

Alexandra Britz was born in Grahamstown, South Africa, in 1990. She was raised in the countryside and spent much of her early childhood exploring coastal areas, whereupon she became fascinated with the ocean. At seven, Britz attended Kingswood College, where she studied Art and Drama for the duration of her school career. In early adolescence, Britz began reading everything from Eugenie Clark’s work to William Blake’s illustrated poetry, which had a prodigious impact on the way she thought about art, the mind, and the natural world.

In 2013, Britz graduated from the Vega School of Branding and Communications with a diploma in Photography and was represented at the Sasol New Signatures competition in Johannesburg.

She received her BA Honours in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town with a dissertation focusing on marine pollution in 2017. Although Britz specialized in Painting, her areas of expertise include Photography, Video, Performance Arts, and Printmaking.

In addition to her exhibitions in South Africa, Britz exhibited at The Boat House, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in 2017. Britz uses her exhibitions to inculcate her audience with an awareness of the withering effects of human pollution on marine ecosystems.

Her exhibition, “Swim,” for instance, included a range of  paintings that represent the effects of pollution on marine life in the Mediterranean Sea.Notably, she not only used her work to make her viewers more conscious of ocean pollution but donated 10% of the paintings to the Ondine “Save Our Seas” initiative.

Likewise, her exhibition, “Erasure,” included a variety of artworks that depict environmental erasure. More specifically, her dark, opaque seascapes, which comprise several mediums (namely, paint, embossed prints, and photographic images), portray the polluted, underpopulated marine ecosystems of the Western Cape. Britz ultimately aims to present her viewers with a dystopian vision of capitalism, rampant consumerism, and technological progress, which constitute a global threat to marine wildlife.

When I swim in the ocean

I feel totally present in the moment and loose track of time, it is this energy that I try capture in my art.