Thirza Schaap

Thirza Schaap (b. 1971, the Netherlands) lives and works between Amsterdam and Cape Town. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 1996 and began her career in commercial photography. Her work has since been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Christie's Amsterdam, Bildhalle Amsterdam and Fabrica Research Centre in Venice. In 2022, she was invited as a special guest to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London. Her work has been widely published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper's Magazine, Vogue, Elle, L'Officiel, Aperture and i-D.

In 2026, Schaap presented two solo exhibitions in South Africa: Fatal Flowers at Candice Berman Gallery in Johannesburg, featuring a new body of paintings, and After the Tide at Berman Contemporary in Cape Town. After the Tide presented photographs from her ongoing Plastic Ocean series alongside a selection of the sculptural arrangements from which the images emerge, making visible the processes of selection, construction and composition that underpin her photographic practice.

Schaap's first monograph, Plastic Ocean, was published in 2021. That same year, she received the Inspiration Award from Hedy d'Ancona and the Dutch Humanistic Association.

Thirza Schaap is represented by Berman Contemporary.