Maria Kreyn
Overview
Maria Kreyn (b. 1987) is an American artist whose emotionally charged works merge figuration, geometry, and elemental atmospherics. Internationally collected, she has created monumental commissions including a Shakespeare-inspired cycle for London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane. In 2024, she presented a solo exhibition at St. George’s Church during the Venice Biennale. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Selected Press
Artnet News, How This Fintech Platform Is Democratizing Art Collecting, Starting at Just $1, 2025, 31/07/2025
Trebuchet Magazine, A preview of Chronos by Maria Kreyn at Venice 2024, 22/04/2024
House Collective, Chaos Theory: Artist Maria Kreyn on metaphysics, mythological constructs and the majesty of nature, John-Paul Pryor, 27/04/2024
Art Observed, AO Review: Maria Kreyn's Chronos in Venice Italy, 20/05/2024
Arts and Collections, Maria Kreyn Presents Chronos in Venice
Works
Video
Biography
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.
Exhibitions
-
MARIA KREYN
DREAM LOGIC 12 - 19 Oct 2026Dream Logic brings together Maria Kreyn’s storm paintings in the setting of the Swiss Church, Covent Garden. The works depict luminous vortexes of cloud, weather and light, cut through by planes of prismatic geometry. Kreyn takes up the Romantic tradition’s fascination with the sublime power of nature, but her storms are less about the weather itself than about what lies beyond it: each painting acts as a portal into a philosophical dreamscape where the vastness of the cosmos is bound up with intimate human emotion.Read more
Her technique sets two very different modes against each other. On one side is the physical energy of Turner and the careful, detailed rendering of Vernet; on the other, mathematical abstraction and visualisations of multidimensional space. Turbulent skies and shifting fields of light are crossed by ovoid, parabolic and linear forms that behave like lenses, bending the visual field and hinting at an underlying order just beyond the edge of perception.
-
Maria Kreyn
Hyperobject 12 - 20 Oct 2025The MoN Art Foundation is delighted to present Hyperobject, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Maria Kreyn, within the luminous architecture of the Fitzrovia Chapel. Coinciding with Frieze London 2025, the exhibition transforms this sacred space into a site of awe and contemplation, where light, geometry, and atmosphere converge.Read more -
Maria Kreyn
Chronos 15 Apr - 22 Jun 2024Maria Kreryn's painting show opening in Venice April 16 - June 22 at St George's Anglican Church, Venice, Italy.Read more -
Maria Kreyn
Lensing a Storm 7 Sep 2023Ministry of Nomads is delighted to present Lensing a Storm, a collection of new works by New York based painter Maria Kreyn.Read more
