Maria Kreyn is a contemporary oil painter who specializes in the creation of figurative, Renaissance and Baroque-style works.
She was commissioned by Andrew Lloyd Webber to develop a collection of eight paintings based on Shakespeare. She worked with British scholar Trevor Nunn, the only living person to direct all 39 of Shakespeare’s plays. The paintings were inspired by some of Shakespeare’s most notable works including Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest. The art works were installed in 2021 at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. The creations were a part of a three-year-long, $82 million renovation managed by Webber, who has owned the space for 44 years.
The artist’s work entitled Alone Together has been featured in the plot of Shonda Rhimes’ ABC television show- The Catch.
Kreyn is set to exhibit a new work entitled Dynamical Systems, in which the artist experiments with zooming out to create a new perspective. The work will be showcased at C1760, a new art gallery created by Colnagi Gallery Ltd, located on the Upper East Side at 38 East 70th Street (New York).
The new works examine the human condition from the perspective of planetary weather. It explores the logic and physics of our emotions and other ideas involving dynamical systems that are both organized and chaotic.
According to the official press release, the exhibition will “feature an array of different artists and their reactions to the-sometimes drastic-changes throughout the past century: physical barriers between countries, cultures, and people as well as innovative technology and the exploration of epistemology and perception.”
Artist’s Biography
Kreyn is a visual artist who studied math and philosophy at the University of Chicago. She is also self-taught in painting. Her creations have been exhibited at many galleries in the United States and Europe, and at various locations in China. Her creations have been featured in Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, The Art Newspaper, The Financial Times and others. Her collection of works based on Shakespeare are now on permanent display at London’s Drury Lane Theater and remains open to the public.
Her artworks feature components of the Baroque and Romantic periods. According to the artist’s official website, “Maria’s paintings can be best described as a re-mix 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 master works, she reframes these techniques and expanded their pictorial vocabulary into a realm of stirring emotional narratives; unique personal histories and surreal fictions. “
She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, with additional studios in London and Los Angeles.
‘Alone Together’ on ‘The Catch’
The painting depicts two distinct expressions of romantic love. Figure one, the woman displayed on the first half of the art, appears to be in a complex situation-she may be unsure of the nature of the relationship and its juxtaposed against the assurance of the male figure. The art features an excellent usage of shadow and light by placing emphasis on the woman’s expression which raises philosophical questions for observers.
Interview
Arts Tribune: At what point in your life did you want to become an artist?
Maria Kreyn: Forever. I was drawing all my life, but I was rather intimidated by painting. And so I went and studied a lot of other things, including math and philosophy at a university. And then at some point I just sort of woke up at the age of 20 and realized that all of the people whom I looked up to historically were masters by the age of 16. And taking stock of that immediately, I decided to leave school and begin painting immediately.
Arts Tribune: What inspires you to create your art? How about the creative process, do you create art individually or do you work on many different projects simultaneously?
Maria Kreyn: The human experience…I work on a lot of things at once and I work on projects sort of with a long-term focus. And I also work on a lot of smaller experimental things, sort of on rotation, almost compulsively whenever I can in between those more focused projects.
Arts Tribune: You were commissed by Andrew Llyod Webber to create Shakespeare inspired art. Which work is your favorite and what play is it based on?
Maria Kreyn: I don’t have a specific favorite. I think I worked equally intentionally on all of them, but I would say that of all the eight, the painting that I did for The Tempest is the one that’s imprinted the most on the work that I’m doing right now and the work that I’ve done over this past year since that project opened.
Arts Tribune: In The Tempest, there’s a big storm that happens and it changes everything including the visual and performing art that you see on stage. Does your art reflect it in terms of the abstract nature of what a storm can bring? Or was it more about interpersonal communication? Was it more about the characters or the inciting incident of the play?
Maria Kreyn: It’s both, I think, in focusing on the storm as something that is an abstract phenomenon that’s changing. I was trying to find that parallel with the experience of Prospero, the main character who is sort of lensed and changed and transformed by the event. And so the parallel between inner and outer experience is really most evident there. I mean, in Shakespeare, he’s always paralleling epic global phenomena with the internal psyche. And so this one was so obvious in that way, but it also created this opportunity to create a very abstract piece of work that still had a highly figurative component. And running with that into my future projects has been very, very exciting, and it’s just given me a template to work with that’s very new.
Arts Tribune: Speaking of your new projects, based on what I’ve read so far, it’s a little bit different than some of the art that you’ve created relatively recently. Is that true? And if so, how is your new gallery different from your previous work?
Maria Kreyn: I think exactly the way that I was describing The Tempest. There is a lot more experimenting involved in the actual paint application and the abstract nature of the paint and how it juxtaposes against some of the more controlled elements of the paint that I’m actually more used to working with. As someone who’s been really obsessed with the figure for a very long time and trying to create an illusion of reality on the canvas, it’s been really exciting to step back from that and sort of play more and develop a new visual language that now I can learn to not only speak but be poetic with.
Arts Tribune: As for your new gallery, when is it running and where can we go see it?
Maria Kreyn: So, they are actually in the process of opening up a much more impressive space that will. feature all of this work soon.
Visit Maria Kreyn’s Official website.