Marsi van de Heuvel’s painting practice navigates personal and collective histories, tracing the intersections of memory, identity, and systemic erasure within the South African context. Working mainly from archival, and most recently from contemporary, photographic sources, she reconstructs images through a painterly language that deliberately resists clarity, allowing forms to dissolve, fragment, and fade into the bare background.

Van de Heuvel’s latest series ‘Purple Hearts’ confronts the ongoing crisis of gender-based violence in South Africa. Rendered through a limited palette dominated by shades of purple - a colour historically associated with protest and resistance - the paintings draw from images of public demonstrations and acts of collective mourning. Figures emerge and recede within the surface, their presence at once asserted and obscured, reflecting both the visibility and silencing of women’s experiences. In South Africa, gender-based violence has been widely described as a national emergency, with rates among the highest in the world; intimate partner femicide is estimated to be nearly five times the global average.

In this series, van de Heuvel shifts from historical reflection to urgent contemporaneity, foregrounding the lived realities of violence that continue to shape women’s lives. The work resists spectacle; instead, it holds space for grief, solidarity, and quiet defiance. Within the context of ‘The Many Within Her II’, these paintings extend the exhibition’s exploration of womanhood into the political realm, insisting on the recognition of violence not as an abstract issue, but as a deeply embedded and ongoing condition.

This engagement with visibility and erasure is rooted in van de Heuvel’s earlier series ‘Skoonveld’ - an Afrikaans term suggesting the act of clearing or disappearance - which reflects on the forced removals of communities under Apartheid’s Group Areas Act. Drawing on demolished neighbourhoods such as District Six, as well as her own family’s history of displacement, these works consider the systemic erasure of people classified as “coloured” by the apartheid regime. Here, the fading of the image becomes both a formal and conceptual strategy, mirroring the violence of removal and the fragility of memory.

Working primarily in oil on raw linen, van de Heuvel employs a restrained and atmospheric palette, allowing figures and interiors to hover on the threshold of visibility. Areas of negative space interrupt the composition, suggesting absence as much as presence, and inviting the viewer to engage with what is withheld. By softening and partially obscuring her source material, she resists the authority of the photographic archive, instead proposing a more fluid understanding of history - one that acknowledges the instability of memory while opening space for personal and collective identification.

Across her practice, van de Heuvel constructs a visual language of disappearance and return. Whether addressing the historical erasures of apartheid or the ongoing realities of gender-based violence, her work insists on the importance of looking closely - at what remains, what has been lost, and what continues to demand recognition.