Our Secret Auction Artists: Maria Kreyn
Here at Art on a Postcard, we are always so grateful for the extreme generosity of our artists not only for donating a postcard-sized work of art to help us raise money for The Hepatitis C Trust, but for the amount of time that they set aside to support us.
This year we are delighted to be hosting our exhibition at WeWork in Devonshire Square. WeWork provides beautiful, collaborative work spaces offering ambitious businesses the space, community and services they need to thrive. Taking inspiration from WeWork we decided to meet up with some of the 170 artists who kindly donated work to this year’s Secret Auction to discuss their studio spaces and how it influences their practice.
We met with exciting artist Maria Kreyn to discover what makes her studio so special.
How would you describe your studio?
I call it the spaceship. It’s a sanctuary and incubator for ideas and stories, and a place to host friends and family and enjoy all sorts of banter.
How does your personal environment affect your creative practice?
If I'm deep into an idea, I can work anywhere, but ideally I want to feel like I'm at home, outside of time, in flow.
What makes a good space to create art in?
As a painter, an ideal space has loads of north light, lots of wall space, high ceilings. But really, a good space is one that you don't notice or need to manage, where you can dive into work and forget yourself in it.
Artist Bio:
Maria Kreyn is a Russian born artist, educated in drawing at SORA (School of Representational Art), and at the University of Chicago (in math and philosophy). Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries in the United States and Europe, and has traveled to multiple museums in China.
Reprising art historical conventions of the Baroque and Romantic periods, Maria’s paintings can be best described as a re-mix of familiar pictorial tropes and iconographies that communicate through a combination of allegory, masterfully rendered figures, and mysterious scenes which are neither of a 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. From a predominantly female, even androgynous, perspective, Kreyn tells a story of human intimacy and ceremony, investigating the liminal state of connection and detachment.
Maria lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
