Maria Kreyn

Maria Kreyn is known for evocative paintings that merge masterful figuration, abstract geometries, and elemental atmospherics.Invoking the Romantic tradition, which celebrates the sublime power of nature and space, Kreyn's recent work offers a personal, poetic interpretation of the genre of landscape painting in which the figure is conspicuously absent. Her storm paintings are portals into philosophic dreamscapes that are at once playful and foreboding. 

 

Situating her works alongside the historic landscapes of the 18th and 19th century, Kreyn's paintings seem to glow from inside their surface, like luminous vortexes where reality and illusion are confused and entangled. Chaotic yet calculated tumbles of sensual paint and color belie a sense of the apocalyptic Sublime, where nature is seen as a beautiful yet virulent force spiraling out of control. The works' pictorial strength lies in these contradictory sensations of the wild and ethereal, energetic, and delicate. As a foil to this organic turbulence, Kreyn introduces a geometric vision of a lensed space-a repeating shape that intersects and overlays the world like the lens of the human mind itself, an unstable stamp of the Anthropocene. Kreyn's storms take direct root in her painting of The Tempest (commissioned by Andrew Lloyd Webber as part of Kreyn's 8- painting Shakespeare Cycle, now on permanent display in the lobby of the historic Theater Royal Drury Lane).

 

Her background in highly refined figurative painting provides the sense of drawing and representational rendering that permeates and enhances the abstract marks of her recent work. Her education in mathematics and philosophy, and other interests in neuroscience and mythology, lead Kreyn to atypical connections between disparate fields. She distills these references into a personal vocabulary of forms and geometries that result in hybrid landscapes situated at the intersection of formalism, abstract expressionism, and Romantic painting. Moving fluidly between the abstraction of mathematics and the sensual ecosystems of the natural world, flat planes of prismatic geometry paradoxically intersect deep, atmospheric space. With this distinct and original visual language Kreyn asks,"How would we see the expanse of space if our eyes were a prism, not a sphere?" 

 

Maria Kreyn studied math and philosophy at the University of Chicago and is self taught in painting. Her work has been featured in Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, The Art Newspaper, The Financial Times, and many others. Maria's painting 'Alone Together' drives the plot of Shonda Rhimes' ABC television show The Catch; and her Shakespeare Cycle paintings appear on the award-winning show The Crown. Kreyn's public works include a collection of 8 monumental paintings based on Shakespeare, commissioned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, now on permanent display in the lobby of London's historic Theater Royal Drury Lane, open to the public daily. 

 

Reprising art historical conventions of the Baroque and Romantic periods, Maria's paintings re-mix familiar pictorial tropes and iconographies, communicating through a combination of allegory, masterfully rendered figures, and mysterious scenes of neither specific time nor place. Kreyn's compositions are not strictly traditional. While deriving their technical foundations from old master works, she reframes these techniques and expands their pictorial vocabulary into a realm of stirring emotional narratives, unique personal histories, and surreal fictions. Her expansive canvases are meditations on nature, the body, and materiality. Maria lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.