A solo-show by Maria Calandra
To Maria Calandra, landscapes are not only frames of the world. That is, landscapes are not only what we could call an organized representation of a natural place—real or not—done according to the techniques provided by art history, such as perspective, color schemes, tonal contrasts, and lines.
Image gallery
To be sure, her colorful canvases are indeed landscapes, but they do not depict simply trees and lakes, mountains and horizons. They are representations of something else entirely, more sensible than properly visible.
Calandra’s landscapes are not just the framing of what she sees—they are also the framing of what she feels.
In this second exhibition with GNYP Gallery Berlin, Maria Calandra shows an incremental step from her last show. While then, in 2023, she presented what one might call a more straightforward representation of landscapes—the horizon line, for instance, was one identifiable and structural element, and now it is practically gone, integrated into the painterly vortex—she currently seems to be overstepping that domain. Still, she does not abandon entirely the reference to the genre.
The rapport to landscape representations across art history is still present, showing that innovations are made from the constant inquiry into tradition and not, as the modernists used to think, by sheer destruction of the past. In this regard, decreeing a blank slate approach in such a delicate thing as a landscape would be a little bit hypocritical.
Therefore, by not doing this, Calandra’s rapport with the genre’s history is as much an ethical attitude as an esthetical one. To paint landscapes nowadays is to cherish our world and history.
But how are these landscapes different? First, they are not only painterly representations of sensory realities like rivers, mountains, trees, skies, rainbows, and the horizon (all of these present in one canvas or another in this exhibition).
More than that, they are representations of another domain—time (hence, by the way, the exhibition's title). Here, the delicate and tumultuous merging of colors and forms suggests the fundamental instability that pervades everything out there. Everything is bending in and out of itself all the time. While we might be witnessing just the seasons changing—what would already be a formidable accomplishment, something essayed first by painters in the Dutch Golden Age, when turbulent waves and clouds expressed such a notion—Sure, one may claim that a tree is never just a tree, but in art what usually counts is the accent one gives to things.
Maria Calandra provides a distinct accent to the dynamic that connects all things. It was never just a landscape.
Additional information
About the artist:
Maria Calandra was born in London in 1976 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In her paintings Calandra explores natural landscapes with vibrant paletes and gestural shapes. Inspired by her wonderings in the wild, she translates into canvas the colors reflected on water, the twisting of tree trunks and roots, the repeating lines and organic structures of nature: “Channeling a stream of consciousness, I pull from both the real and imagined while using a form of automatic painting to guide me. I try to make connections between that which I observed and that which I remember. Some of these memories date back to my youth.” The result are paintings dense with detail, purposefully lacking depth, to which one’s eyesight needs to adjust, as if it were in the woods. In her graphite drawings, made in connection to the ongoing project Pencil in the Studio, she depicts the studios and artworks of her contemporaries and the places these and other works exist beyond the studio: museums, galleries, artists’ homes, and collectors’ walls. Acting like a portrait and homage to not only her historical influences and the institutes they exist in, but also to the work of her contemporary peers. Calandra holds an MFA in Painting from Cornell University, and a BFA in Painting from Ohio University.
Thursday – Saturday, 12–18h
and by a appointment
Participating artists
Maria Calandra
Dates
October 2024
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