Maria Svarbova

Maria’s distinctive style departs from traditional portraiture and focuses on experimentation with space, color and atmosphere. Taking an interest in communist-era architecture and public spaces, Maria transforms each scene with a modern freshness that highlights the depth and range of her creative palette. Carefully composed figures create thematic, dream-like scenes with ordinary objects. Her images hold a silent tension that hints at emergent possibilities under the lilt of clean and smooth surfaces.

There is often a sense of cool detachment and liminality in Maria’s work. Routine actions such as exercise, doctor’s appointments and domestic tasks are reframed with a visual purity that is soothing and symmetrical, and at times reverberant with an ethereal stillness. The overall effect evokes a contemplative silence in an extended moment of promise and awareness—a quality difficult to achieve in the rapid pace of contemporary life. Maria’s postmodern vision boldly articulates a dialog that compels the viewer to respond to the mystery, loneliness and isolation of the human experience. Nevertheless, deeply embedded within the aqueous pastels, her compositions have a celebratory elegance that transforms the viewer’s gaze into an enduring reverence for life’s simple beauty.