Nel Maertens is the festival artist in 2026

Nel Maertens (°1996) is an Antwerp visual artist with a background in fashion. After her master's degree at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, she started working in the fashion sector, but from there she increasingly developed a multidisciplinary practice on the border between visual arts, costume design and performance. Maertens creates drawings, paintings, performances and installations that are characterized by color, energy and playful drawing pleasure, with special attention to femininity and nature.

Her artistic career accelerated in 2021 with her first solo exhibition at CC Strombeek. Since then, she has worked with KMSKA, Rubens House, C-Mine, Rufus Gallery and Horst Arts & Music, among others. Together with 150 children, she created a “dream garden” on the roof of MoMu Antwerp, designed costumes for dance and musical theater shows such as Femke Gyselinck and Zonzo Compagnie, and made jewelry and design objects for labels such as Woche.

An important project by Maertens is Sowing and Harvesting. In this series of site-specific installations and performances, she celebrates the arrival of spring with monumental floral carpets made by hand sprinkling a mixture of pigment and wheat flour. Sowing and Harvesting raises questions about the vulnerable, perishable nature of nature and the image.

No matter how diverse her oeuvre is, Maertens always starts from the drawing. This drawing is often created 'en plein air', outside in the landscape. The changing nature and seasons rhythm her practice and give it a diary-like character. Oil and soft pastels on paper provide a quick, tactile gesture; in the studio, these field sketches grow into slower, layered images. In terms of atmosphere, it's always spring: everything is blooming, always evolving - cut, combine, deform, zoom in and out. As she says: “I garden in my drawings.”

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“I garden with my drawings.”