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The Hole is excited to announce Untune a String an exhibition of new paintings by Maria Kreyn.

For her first solo show in Tribeca, Maria Kreyn has been brewing some storms for us this summer from her Williamsburg studio. Her elemental atmospherics situate her works alongside historic landscape paintings of the early 19th Century with a high Romantic palette of vigorous color and dynamic compositions. Violent and ethereal, these new oil paintings portray centrifugal storms where sea meets sky: a ship or hint of a mast on the horizon puts our minuscule human scale on display. Chaotic tumbles of paint and luminous colors belie a sense of the apocalyptic sublime, capturing a sense of collective anxiety in the face of extreme weather and warming oceans.

According to the artist:

These paintings take direct root in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I became interested in weather and its many representations as a metaphor for the human experience and the mind. Since Shakespeare always parallels epic global phenomena with the internal human psyche, it felt like a mixing of worlds and levels—as above, so below. Thus I’m zooming out from the figure into the atmosphere of planetary weather to the point where the human being is no longer seen, but the patterns of the mind and heart are hopefully still felt.

Celebrating the sublime power of both nature and digital culture, Kreyn’s works are a combination of historical citation and digital diffusion output, all carefully arranged and interwoven to create luminous vortexes where reality and illusion are entangled. She distills her compositional studies of 16th Century painter El Greco, 18th Century artist Vernet and early 19th Century painter Turner alongside patterns of real planetary storms to make a multifarious vision of weather where water and the firmament fuse. The gestural, human marks and many layers of translucent paint encourage a unique bodily resonance and prolonged engagement with the image.

Maria Kreyn (b. 1987 Nizhny Novgorod, Russia) studied math and philosophy at the University of Chicago and is a self-taught painter. Kreyn’s public works include a collection of eight monumental paintings based on Shakespeare, commissioned by Andrew Lloyd Webber and now on permanent display in the lobby of London’s historic Theater Royal Drury Lane. Most recently, she is having a solo show titled Lensing a Storm at Ministry of Nomads in London. Her work has been featured in Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, The Art Newspaper, The Financial Times, and many others. Maria’s painting Alone Together drives the plot of Shonda Rhimes’ ABC television show The Catch; and her Shakespeare Cycle paintings appear on the award-winning show The Crown.

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