Mária Švarbová

Švarbová's distinct 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 subjects. Her images hold a silent tension that encourage the viewer to question the possibilities under the facade of clean and smooth surfaces. Routine, everyday activities 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 a 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.