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- 10 - 19
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- $250k - $500k
Venice, Italy, April 2024– Ministry of Nomads Art Foundation (MON) is pleased to present Maria Kreyn’s solo exhibition CHRONOS: ten monumental new oil paintings by the American artist installed in the historic St. George’s Anglican Church (Chiesa di San Giorgio).
Heightened by the ecclesiastical setting of an active Anglican church, CHRONOS immerses the viewer in a meditation on the material nature of time, reflecting on turbulent weather systems and our fragile human connection with the atmosphere. Kreyn’s latest body of luminous, large-scale landscape works combine the artist’s signature crisp brushwork and angular lines with dramatic movement and flourishes of colour. This new suite of oil paintings is inspired by ancient Greek mythology, the omnipotence of the elements of nature, and the climate crisis.
Across several works, a recurring motif of ovoid shapes invokes the Orphic creation myth, according to which the god Chronos — the personification of time and the first living being — spawned Aether (Ether), Chaos, and a cosmic silver egg. The cosmic egg – a metaphor for creation and potential found in many other cultures to explain the birth of the universe – becomes a powerful symbol for Kreyn, to contemplate the possibility of regeneration, renewal, and change.
Moving from bright bursts of lights, other works employ a menacing, fiery palette to herald a more troubling, but equally compelling, visual experience. Kreyn reprises the Romantic tradition and its celebration of the sublime power of nature in works that are both playful and foreboding, landscapes that evoke sea and sky, chaos, and calculation. These otherworldly works capture a sense of collective anxiety in the face of extreme weather and climate change — a dazzling vision of a terrifying, looming, universal threat.
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Maria Kreyn (b. 1987) is an American artist known for evocative paintings that merge figuration, abstract geometries, and elemental atmospherics. Born in Nizhnii Novgorod in Russia, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1990. She studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago and is self-taught in painting. While drawing atypical and polymathic connections between disparate fields, Kreyn’s works are steeped in the western tradition of painting. She distills these references into a personal vocabulary of forms and geometries that result in hybrid compositions situated at the intersection of formalism and Romantic painting. Deriving her technical foundations from old masterworks, Kreyn re-frames these techniques and expands their pictorial vocabulary into a realm of stirring emotional narratives, unique personal histories, and surreal fictions. 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 Theatre Royal Drury Lane, open to the public daily. Maria Kreyn lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Campo San Vio, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy
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