Marieke Zwart (1987, Nijmegen) is an artist based in Amsterdam. Her drawings, videos, and installations often emerge from a socially engaged and collaborative practice. Zwart’s work explores themes such as care, dependency, and the act of looking as a social and political gesture. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2009) and an MA in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (2015), and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2017–2018). She has worked with mental health clients during residencies at Het Vijfde Seizoen (Den Dolder) and IBB (Curaçao), and collaborated with Buurtzorg Nederland on a drawing project focused on community nursing.
In her recent work, Zwart investigates themes of reproduction and care, and the often-invisible dynamics within them. In the series Bijlmermeer (2023–ongoing), she creates large-scale drawings and collages based on her observations of two care workers in Amsterdam Southeast: midwife Willemijn Speelman and maternity nurse Joyce Aboagye. Their work, largely carried out behind closed doors, is brought to light through Zwart’s attentive focus on posture, touch, and proximity. In parallel, she developed the series Stekjes (Cuttings), consisting of small observational drawings made weekly in the studio, each depicting a plant cutting on her desk. While formal in appearance, these works are imbued with personal reflections on time, fertility, and the tensions between caregiving and artistic autonomy.
Zwart is the founder of depend on me (2021), a collaborative research initiative in Amsterdam for both professional and non-professional artists. In 2023, several artists from the group co-founded Good Martha, a foundation dedicated to supporting collaborative art practices.
Her work is part of the collections of the Amsterdam City Archives, Amsterdam UMC, and Buurtzorg Nederland, and has been exhibited at venues including 1646 (The Hague), 3331 Arts Chiyoda (Tokyo), Museum Dr. Guislain (Ghent), Kunsthal (Rotterdam), IBB (Curaçao), Fotodok/Casco (Utrecht), Ateliers ’89 (Aruba), Cargo in Context (Amsterdam), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), AT5, and the Amsterdam Museum.
