Bid to win a large format print of Alone Together by Maria Kreyn, the sold-out edition!
Artist: Maria Kreyn
Title: Alone Together
Medium: Museum quality print on archival paper, as seen on ABC's The Catch
Print details:
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 remix 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 masterworks, 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.
About the painting:
This work captures a unique moment in an erotic relationship—the profound ambivalence that comes with romantic love. The woman is both pulling her lover in, and looking away at the same time. She is neither happy nor sad, suspended in that liminal state. The male is far less complex, content to bury his head in her neck, symbolically admitting his desire to know only this moment, while the woman looks into the past and the future, both holding on and letting go. The woman, as artist, must also be prepared to embrace the viewer’s gaze as a romantic gesture, however keeping in mind the unforeseen future of that relationship. In my work, I also seek to embrace these dualities, to capture the moments in-between. I’m depicting an older, more classical version, of romantic love. Yet at the same time, here in this painting, and in my own life, that romantic love must accommodate fear and uncertainty. Paying homage to classical form, this work throws in relief the modern conceptions of female ambivalence: as she pulls him in, she pulls away, and her facial complexity —accommodating uncertainty, fear, and doubt — is deeply contemporary. She is in control, yet frightened. Painted with Caravaggio and the Baroque school in mind, the light and shadow are defined with clarity, and the characters look like real people— beautiful, but unidealized. The jarring quality of the arm’s placement breaks with classical composition. It allows the male to be the center of the painting, yet completely anonymous. His placement reminds us of a sleeping satyr, as the woman remains alert to present danger. He is both being held gently, and being gripped. Her arm almost seems to be holing up the head of Samson; and her white hand, like a signifier of death, points to the other side of romantic love, to the sadness of completion. He becomes every man, and she every woman. And through that unique romantic moment, we can see this dynamic of ambivalence and duality present in us all and in all interactions— we want, let go, take, and pull away, together, yet isolated.
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