Maria Andrievskaya

Through figurative painting, hazy and timeless landscapes are populated with female characters that appear safe within their luminous sanctuary despite their perils. These figures, with their nuanced attitudes and symbolic baggage, navigate the la...

Through figurative painting, hazy and timeless landscapes are populated with female characters that appear safe within their luminous sanctuary despite their perils. These figures, with their nuanced attitudes and symbolic baggage, navigate the landscapes with a fluidity that speaks to their inherent connection to nature. Ambiguous in scale and defiantly exposed, the women shift their perceived vulnerability into power and belonging. Within her work, the land serves as a sentient character in its own right, one that beckons us in and soothes all that exists within it. As part of her continuing material enquiry, she collect rocks and earth from her homeland of Cyprus to grind into handmade oil paint, as if to partly infuse the canvas with the environment she is recalling. Shifting between our collective familiarity of old master techniques with the childhood motifs that informed her own lifetime, she seeks to challenge the accessibility and hierarchy of visual language in art. Through painting, she is curious to find an alternative reality, in response to our failure to protect that which nurtures us.