Maria Svarbova Slovakian, b. 1988

Maria Svarbova was born in 1988 in Slovakia. Despite having studied restoration and archeology, her artistic medium is photography. From 2010 to the present, the immediacy of Maria’s photographic instinct keeps on garnering international acclaim and is setting new precedents in photographic expression. She has received several prestigious awards, including the Hasselblad Masters Award, and her exhibitions have placed her among the vanguard of her contemporaries, attracting attention of prominent publications such as Vogue, Forbes, CNN or The Guardian around the world. Her work is a staple of social media’s limelight. Maria’s talent earned her a spot on the coveted 30 under 30 Forbes list as well as a commission for a billboard-sized promotion on the massive Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan. In 2019, Apple commission her to create an exclusive photography series shot by iPhone. This publication is preceded by two books of her photographs: Swimming Pool (2017) and Future Retro (2019). Swimming Pools presents an updated version of the now out-of- stock Swimming Pool, and it features new format, design and content.

Maria’s distinctive style departs from traditional portraiture and focuses on experimentation with space, color and atmosphere. Taking an interest in communist-era architecture and public spaces, Maria transforms each scene with a modern freshness that highlights the depth and range of her creative palette. Carefully composed figures create thematic, dream-like scenes with ordinary objects. Her images hold a silent tension that hints at emergent possibilities under the lilt of clean and smooth surfaces. 

There is often a sense of cool detachment and liminality in Maria’s work. Routine actions such as exercise, doctor‘s appointments and domestic tasks are reframed with a visual purity that is soothing and symmetrical, and at times reverberant with an ethereal stillness. The overall effect evokes a contemplative silence in an extended moment of promise and awareness—a quality difficult to achieve in the rapid pace of contemporary life. Maria’s postmodern vision boldly articulates a dialog that compels the viewer to respond to the mystery, loneliness and isolation of the human experience. Nevertheless, deeply embedded within the aqueous pastels, her compositions have a celebratory elegance that transforms the viewer’s gaze into an enduring reverence for life’s simple beauty. 

The gallery Kolektiv Cité Radieuse, devoted to visual arts and design from Central and Eastern Europe and established at the Le Corbusier Housing Unit in Marseille, invited Maria Svarbova to realize a series of 20 pictures exploring the relation between human beings and the “machine for living” designed by the emblematic architect. In the summer of 2021, Marseille’s Radiant City project hosts a series of Maria’s original pictures made for Le Corbusier‘s “vertical village.“ In this work, the artist builds on themes she has been exploring – modernist aesthetics and social distancing between individuals –, to deliver both a mythological reflection on our experience of isolation, and a luminous tribute to the genius of the place. Although bearing the unmistakable mark of their author, in line with her vision of the relationship of individuals to modernist aesthetics – including its impersonal and standardized traits –, these photographs constitute a new milestone in Maria‘s visual journey.